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AI Agent Glossary

Sub-agent

An agent spawned by another agent to handle a bounded subtask in its own context.

Sub-agents give the parent agent a way to do work without consuming its own context window: the child gets a fresh context, does the exploration or execution, and returns a distilled result. Common uses are codebase search, web research and code review. The trade-off is latency and the risk that the child lacks context the parent had.

Source: Claude Code subagents — Anthropic docs

See the numbers behind this term: AI Agent Statistics 2026.