Claude Managed Agents

I suspect this is effectively programatic access to the same infrastructure used by Claude Desktop when it needs to run jobs in the cloud on the Anthropic servers... with added configurability and observations.

In other words, it is designed for companies to build on top of the Anthropic platform. Fo example, you are a SaaS and you want to build a way of running agents programatically for your customers, they basically offer a solution. It is not for personal use although you can certainly do so if you are prepared to pay the price for the API.

The downside is obviously this is locked to Anthropic models.

The other downsides is that the authentication story at the moment is underwhelming, hacking, and dare I say, insecure. I have a few reservations.

We already have this platform and I am putting together and open-source example how to create your own version of this.

Anthropic models are great but there are plenty of open-source models too and frankly agents do not need to run like claude code in order to be successful at whatever they need to do. The agent architecture entirely depends on the problem domain in my own experience.

I'm suspicious that this is going to lead to optimal orchestration ... or rather, that open source won't produce a far better alternative in time.

The best performance I've gotten is by mixing agents from different companies. Unless there is a "winner take all" agent (I seriously doubt it, based on the dynamics and cost of collecting high quality RL data), I think the best orchestration systems are going to involve mixing agents.

Here, it's not about the planner, it's about the workers. Some agents are just better at certain things than others.

For instance, Opus 4.6 on max does not hold a candle to GPT 5.4 xhigh in terms of bug finding. It's just not even a comparison, iykyk.

Almost analogous to how diversity of thought can improve the robustness of the outcomes in real world teams. The same thing seems to be true in mixture-of-agent-distributions space.

I saw this coming. Anthropic wants to shift developers on to their platform where they’re in control. The fight for harness control has been terribly inconvenient for them.

To score a big IPO they need to be a platform, not just a token pipeline. Everything they’re doing signals they’re moving in this direction.

I’ve been building my own version of this. It’s a bit shocking to see parallel ideation.

FWIW- IMO, being locked into a single model provider is a deal breaker.

This solution will distract a lot of folks and doom-lock them into Anthropic. That’ll probably be fine for small offices, but it is suicidal to get hooked into Anthropic’s way of doing things for anything complex. IME, you want to be able to compare different models and you end up managing them to your style. It’s a bit like cooking- where you may have greater affinity for certain flavors. You make selection tradeoffs on when to use a frontier model on design & planning vs something self hosted for simpler operations tasks.

We're in the early days of agentic frameworks, like the pre-PHP web. CGI scripts and webmasters. Eventually the state-of-the-art will slow down and we'll eventually have something elegant like Rails come out.

Until then, every agent framework is completely reinvented every week due to new patterns and new models. evals, ReACT, DSPy, RLM, memory patterns, claws, dynamic context, sandbox strategies. It seems like locking in to a framework is a losing proposition for anyone trying to stay competitive. See also: LangChain trying to be the Next.js/Vercel of agents but everyone recommending building your own.

That said, Anthropic pulls a lot of weight owning the models themselves and probably an easier-to-use solution will get some adoption from those who are better served by going from nothing to something agentic, despite lock-in and the constant churn of model tech

I assume Mythos, if ever released to the wide public at all, will only be available in the Claude cloud harness. (Not counting special enterprise and government contracts naturally.)

Not quite sold on this. I'm going to stick with pydantic ai and dbos/temporal/celery. I do not want to be vendor locked into one of these players. I want to work with absoluately any llm I want... I think we need to keep pushing for best in class open source orchestrtion and not get sucked into this platforms.

Looks great, I can't wait to use it. I imagine it could become very expensive for certain workflows, it will probably be like AWS where if you're not careful with the setup and watching what you're doing it will spin up 1000s of agents and rack up huge bills! It's going to be a massive money spinner!

This was inevitable, I called this a few weeks ago [1]. It’s an easy way to increase revenue without making the models smarter, and lock you in harder

https://danthegoodman.substack.com/p/where-agents-converge

The next $100B buisness model in 2026 is AaaS (Agent as a Service).

This is actually really nice from anthropic. They are aggressively owning the entire development stack for every swe. They become the default development platform. Automatic recurring revenue too and I am sure they will come up with more categories of subscriptions too.

I wonder how long until Claude/OpenAI eat a lot of the current AI/Agent SaaS's lunch.

Originally I thought they would stick towards being a model provider mainly, but with all the recent releases it seems they do want to provide more "services."

Wonder what part of the market 3rd party apps will build a moat around?

Those agents did such a wonderful job making and deploying this page that the testimonials are unreadable because each spot has two of them overlapping.

It’s all good until your production agents deployment has a single 9 uptime. I use Claude Code as my main coding harness daily but making customers reliant on Anthropic software is a big no-no. Quality engineering is just not their thing.

> With Managed Agents, you define outcomes and success criteria, and Claude self-evaluates and iterates until it gets there (available in research preview, request access here). It also supports traditional prompt-and-response workflows when you want tighter control.

Call me stupid, but this sounds not like they want software developers to be around in a year or two.

The website is solid black on Firefox mobile for android. Maybe they should get an agent on that.

In addition to the managed interface for agent configuration and so on, is the novelty that all the agents run on Anthropic's infra? Sort of like Claude Code on the Web? If so, interesting that they move up the stack, from just a provider of an intelligence API to more complex deployed products.

As someone who spins up docker containers where I use the Anthropic Agentic SDK to build Jekyll websites for customers, I don’t see much of an appeal. I didn’t find it that difficult to set up the infrastructure, the hard part was getting the agents to do exactly what I wanted. Besides, eventually I might want to transition away to another provider (or even self hosting) so I’d prefer having that freedom.

They keep calling this the first solution of this kind...obviously Anthropic is a much larger company, but https://smith.langchain.com/ has this...and had for a while, or am I missing something?

I'm not sure if I'm about to be the old man yelling at clouds, but Anthropic seem to be 'AWS-ifying'. An increasing suite of products which (at least to me) seem to undifferentiated amongst themselves, and all drawn from the same roulette wheel of words.

We've got Claude Managed Agents, Claude Agent SDK, Claude API, Claude Code, Claude Platform, Claude Cowork, Claude Enterprise, and plain old 'Claude'. And honourable mention to Claude Haiku/Sonnet/Opus 4.{whatever} as yet another thing with the same prefix. I feel like it's about once a week I see a new announcement here on HN about some new agentic Claude whatever-it-is.

I have pretty much retreated in the face of this to 'just the API + `pi` + Claude Opus 4.{most recent minor release}', as a surface area I can understand.

Happy to see this launched, particularly today.

I own a stake in a small brewery in Canada, and this feature just saved me setting up some infrastructure to "productionize" an agent we created to assist with ordering, invoicing, and government document creation.

I get paid in beer and vibes for projects like these, so the more I can ship these projects in the same place I prototype them the better.

(Also don't worry all, still have SF income to buy food for my family with)

Reminder that Anthropic's goal is to sell you more tokens...

Are they entering their OpenAI throw shit at the wall phase?

This is going to grow into a sophisticated platform, and is what will eventually compete head on with saas. I dont think companies will build their own agents, aside from looping in tools. As the models improve, there will be less hand holding. This could end up competing with AWS/GCP

And now OpenClaw is dead because serious people have a less janky option!