Three canonical 2026 case studies — pick the closest reference
Anthropic Research
supervisor + workers
Opus 4 plans + synthesizes
Sonnet 4 subagents research
fresh context per subagent
+90.2% over single Opus 4
15x tokens per query
rainbow deploys mandatory
use for: research, knowledge tasks
MetaGPT / ChatDev
SOP role-decomposition
PM · Architect · Coder · QA
Code = SOP(Team)
structured artifact handoffs
communicative
dehallucination
MacNet: 1000+ agents via DAG
use for: engineering workflows
OpenClaw / Moltbook
population-scale substrate
Clawdbot Nov 2025 → 247k ⭐
Moltbook 2.3M agents
Meta acquisition Mar 2026
emergent economy
prompt-injection at scale
state-level regulation response
use for: social / network products
framework landscape — April 2026
LangGraph
production leader · graph + checkpointing + HITL
CrewAI
production leader · role-based crews (Sequential / Hierarchical)
OpenAI Agents SDK
production · Swarm successor · tool-return handoffs
Microsoft Agent Framework
RC Feb 2026 · orchestration patterns · AutoGen merged in
Google ADK · Anthropic SDK
production · A2A-native and research-native respectively
all ship MCP; most ship A2A — protocol compat is no longer a differentiator