Anthropic · 2026-04-08 · major
Claude Managed Agents (Public Beta)
Anthropic ships a managed agent harness in public beta: sandboxed containers, persistent sessions, built-in tools, and multi-agent coordination for $0.08/session-hour on top of standard token pricing.
A fully managed agent harness from Anthropic: you define the agent, they run the sandbox, state, and tools for $0.08 per session-hour.
Key specs
| Price | $0.08/session-hour + tokens |
|---|---|
| Early adopters | Notion, Asana, Sentry, Rakuten |
| Task success lift | up to +10 pts |
What is it?
Claude Managed Agents is a new API-based service from Anthropic that lets developers build and deploy cloud-hosted AI agents without standing up their own infrastructure. You define an agent (model, system prompt, tools, MCP servers, skills), an environment (a container template with packages and network rules), and start a session. Anthropic handles sandboxing, state persistence, tool execution, error recovery, and context management. It launched in public beta on April 8 with no waitlist -- any API account can use it.
How does it work?
The system is built around four concepts: Agents (reusable configurations), Environments (container templates), Sessions (running instances), and Events (messages between your app and the agent via server-sent events). Claude runs autonomously inside the container -- it can execute bash commands, read and write files, browse the web, and call MCP servers. Sessions persist across connection drops and can run for hours. Anthropic reports internal testing showed up to 10-point improvements in task success rate for structured file generation compared to standard API usage.
Why does it matter?
Building a production-grade agent loop -- sandboxing, checkpointing, credential handling, error recovery -- typically takes engineering teams months. Managed Agents collapses that to API calls. At $0.08 per session-hour plus standard token rates, it is cheap enough for async background agents (code review bots, research assistants, data pipelines) that were previously too expensive to host. Notion, Asana, Sentry, and Rakuten are already shipping on it.
Who is it for?
Backend engineers building agent-powered features, teams that want Claude agents without managing containers.
Try it
platform.claude.com/docs/en/managed-agents/quickstart