Nathaniel Whittemore

Managed agents will give developers an agent harness, which describes all the software infrastructure that wraps around an AI model to help it work agentically or take actions on behalf of a user.

In practice, a harness is made up of software tools, a memory system, and other infrastructure.

Agents made through Claude Managed Agent will also come with a built-in sandboxed environment in which the agent can spin up software projects in a secure setting.

The product also allows developers to create agents that can run autonomously for hours in the cloud, monitor what other Claude agents are doing, and toggle permissions that allow agents to access certain tools.

Caitlin Lessie, the head of engineering for the cloud platform said, when it comes to actually deploying and running agents at scale, this is a complex distributed systems engineering problem.

A lot of customers we're talking about previously had a whole bunch of engineers whose job it would have been to build and run those systems at scale.

Now that we are giving them that bit out of the box, they're able to have those same engineers be focused on core competencies of business and their product.

One of the demos provided was in collaboration with Notion, with product manager Eric Liu showing how he can offload a string of client onboarding tasks to his customized Claude agent.

The big point was that the agent was running natively in Notion with full access to everything it needed to complete the task.

Rather than needing to spend days setting up permissions, validating workflows, and figuring out local hosting, Liu was able to drop the managed agent in using a virtual session.

The platform also allows companies like Notion to build their own agents on top of Claude and offer them externally, bringing agents to market more rapidly.

Anthropix Alex Albert writes, Managed Agents eliminates all the complexity of self-hosting an agent, but still allows a great degree of flexibility with setting up your harness tools, skills, etc.

Cloud Codes Tariq writes, Managed Agents is the first agent in the cloud API that has the right mix of simplicity and complexity.

Implementation details like how you manage a sandbox are abstracted, but you have a lot of control over the actual execution of the model.

Anthropics' Lance Martin gave a bunch of examples of what characteristics agents being built with managed agents had.

He writes, some of the common patterns I've noticed across examples in my own work, event triggered, a service triggers the managed agent to do a task.

For example, a system flags a bug and a managed agent writes the patch and opens the PR.

No human in the loop between flag and action.

Scheduled Managed Agent is scheduled to do a task.

For example, I and many others use this platform for scheduled daily briefs, e.g.