Managed Agents preview

Agents you don't host.

A Managed Agent is an Anthropic-hosted instance of an agent — a skill, a Claude Code routine, or an Agent SDK program — that runs on a cron, on a trigger, or on demand. You write the agent; Anthropic runs it. State, retries, observability, secrets are all handled.

The "always-on" tier.

• Recurring jobs (daily news fetch, weekly digest, hourly health check) without your own server.
• Webhook-triggered agents — GitHub PR opened, Linear ticket created, Slack message posted.
• Long-running flows that should survive your laptop closing.

The fastest path.

1. Write a Skill that does the work — see /skills.
2. Run /schedule in Claude Code.
3. Pick a cadence — cron expression or natural-language ("every weekday at 6am").
4. Confirm. The skill is uploaded as a Managed Agent and starts running on schedule.
5. Manage with the schedule skill — list, update, delete.

Where it is in May 2026.

Anthropic ships routines (cron-triggered Managed Agents) today. Webhook-triggered and on-demand variants are rolling out. APIs and console tooling are evolving fast — expect this section to need refreshes.

Treat it like prod.

• Log every run. The dashboard shows status; you'll still want your own log of what happened.
• Notify on failure. Email, Slack, whatever wakes you up if a daily job dies.
• Cap step counts. Cloud bills can run away too.
• Rotate secrets. Anthropic's secret store is the right place; resist the urge to bake API keys into prompts.

Related products.

Every Anthropic surface has its own page on this guide.