{"paper":{"title":"Keeping the Cache Warm Pays: Keepalive Economics for Agentic Workloads","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.DC","authors_text":"Maxim Khailo","submitted_at":"2026-07-21T15:45:47Z","abstract_excerpt":"Frontier LLM providers cache a prompt's processed prefix so that a follow-up request sharing it pays ~10% of the input price and skips most of the prefill latency. Agentic workloads systematically destroy this benefit: the agent sends a request, runs a tool or waits for approval for minutes, and by the time the follow-up is sent the cached prefix has been evicted, so the agent pays the full prefill again. A client-side keepalive, replaying the prefix on a timer during the pause, prevents this, and it is individually rational: across Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and DeepSeek we show that a keepal"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2607.19214","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2607.19214/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}