Claude Managed Agents
Anthropic service in beta (April 2026) that runs Claude as an autonomous agent on managed infrastructure. You describe the agent (model, system prompt, tools, MCP servers, skills) + an environment (container with packages, network access), Anthropic handles the runtime: sandbox, persistent sessions, tool execution, prompt caching, compaction, SSE streaming. Built for long-running tasks (minutes to hours) you do not want to operate yourself.
Strengths
- No need to build the agent loop, sandbox, or session management, Anthropic handles it
- Native tools (bash, file ops, web search/fetch) + MCP servers + skills already integrated
- SSE streaming, prompt caching and compaction included, tunable without custom code
- Persistent sessions, file system and conversation history kept across interactions
Limitations
- Beta, behaviors may shift between versions (version header required)
- Less fine-grained control than Messages API over the exact agent ↔ tools loop
- Per-org rate limits (300 create/min, 600 read/min), may constrain multi-tenant scenarios
- Some features (outcomes, multiagent) in research preview, access on request
Best for
- Product teams that want to expose a Claude agent behind an API without running the infra
- Long async workflows (whole-codebase analysis, data migration, etc.)
- Multi-tenant platforms orchestrating several agents in parallel