Is Claude Fable 5.1 spawning 126 agents for simple tasks for anyone else? It burned ~8.4M tokens on a 5-file i18n audit!
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A user on the $100/month Max 5x plan reported an unusual issue with Claude Fable 5.1, where it spawned 126 agents for a simple 5-file i18n audit, consuming approximately 8.4M tokens. They are seeking to confirm if other users are experiencing similar unexpected high agent parallelism, specifically the number 126, suggesting a potential orchestration bug within the system.
I’m on the $100/month Max 5x plan, and I’ve just had one of the strangest Claude Code experiences I’ve seen so far.
I asked it to audit the login flow of my project for i18n/localization issues.
So roughly 8.4 million tokens were consumed across two executions of a relatively simple localization audit.
This burned through multiple 5-hour usage windows and roughly half of my weekly Max allowance.
What concerns me more is that this doesn’t look like ordinary “agentic workflows use more tokens.”
The same workflow independently hitting exactly 126 agents twice looks much more like some kind of deterministic fan-out/orchestration problem.
For a while, Anthropic’s Fin AI support agent repeatedly told me there was no separate path to human Product Support, even after I explicitly asked for human review of the subscription impact.
Eventually, after opening another support conversation and framing this specifically as a reproducible product defect affecting a paid subscription, Fin finally put me into the human support queue.
I’m not expecting agents to be cheap, and I understand that parallel workflows can burn tokens quickly.
But 126 agents for a 5–6 file localization audit, twice in a row, feels completely broken.
Has anyone else seen workflows suddenly create 50, 100, or 126+ agents without explicitly asking for that level of parallelism?
Especially interested in whether 126 is showing up for anyone else, because seeing the exact same number twice is what really makes me think there’s an orchestration bug here.