A developer is building a travel planning agent that needs to check flights, hotels, and weather for a trip. These three lookups are independent — none depends on the output of another. The developer wants to minimize the number of API round-trips. Can Claude call multiple independent tools in a single response, or must each tool be requested sequentially?
Parallel Tool Calling
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A developer defines two tools: 'search_database' and 'send_email'. The model calls both in the same response. The email is sent with outdated data because search results aren't available yet. What's wrong?
An application has 10 independent tools that can run in parallel. Each takes ~2 seconds. Using parallel calling reduces total time from 20s to ~2s. What's the limiting factor for scaling to 100 tools?