Model Routing Is Simple. Until It Isn’t.

Model Routing Is Simple. Until It Isn’t. Enterprise Article Published July 15, 2026 Upvote 92 Yara Rizk yarizk ibm-research Eyal Shnarch eishna ibm-research Jason Tsay jsntsay ibm-research Merve Unuvar mrvnvr ibm-research Building a router into your agent sounds like an easy win. Send simple requests to cheaper models, reserve expensive ones for harder tasks, or route by specialty — Claude for code, Gemini for multimodal, and so on.

This PriceChange is relevant to the technology intelligence record because it involves Claude, Gemini, gpt-4.1, GPT. The source article should remain the factual reference for follow-up coverage.

• Enterprise Article Published July 15, 2026 Upvote 92 Yara Rizk yarizk ibm-research Eyal Shnarch eishna ibm-research Jason Tsay jsntsay ibm-research Merve Unuvar mrvnvr ibm-research Building a router into your agent sounds like an easy win.
• Send simple requests to cheaper models, reserve expensive ones for harder tasks, or route by specialty — Claude for code, Gemini for multimodal, and so on.
• A classifier or heuristic makes the call, costs go down, performance stays up.
• Most routing systems assume that model selection is a classification problem.
• In our experience building routing into agentic systems, what looks like a model-selection problem quickly becomes a systems optimization problem.
• Three dimensions made this surprisingly hard for us.