Without Caching, Your AI Agent Costs 10x More - George Cameron, Artificial Analysis

George Cameron of Artificial Analysis explains what drives the cost of AI agents in 2026, covering input tokens, cache hit rate, reasoning effort and the number of steps per task. He walks through a worked example where a task costs about $21 with caching and over $200 without it, and offers a framework for deciding when a frontier model is worth its price and when a cheaper model delivers the same result.