Anthropic Managed Agents

Run Claude agents in Anthropic’s managed runtime and give them a Browserbase session to drive the web.

Managed Agents is Anthropic’s hosted runtime for Claude. Anthropic provisions the container, the tool harness, and the agent loop. You supply an environment, credentials, a system prompt, and start a session. Pair a Managed Agent with a Browserbase session and Claude can navigate, click, and extract data on the open web without you hosting a browser fleet.

This integration connects the two surfaces:

• Managed Agents runs Claude in an Anthropic-managed sandbox with bash, file tools, and any custom tools you declare.
• Browserbase provides the isolated Chromium session the agent connects to over CDP, plus Live View, session recordings, and Agent Identity.

Managed Agents is in beta. All requests use the managed-agents-2026-04-01 beta header, which the Anthropic SDKs set automatically. See Anthropic’s docs for current status.

Why pair them

Claude needs two things to browse the web reliably: a durable runtime to hold the loop, and a real browser to drive the page. Running either one yourself is painful.

• Anthropic owns the runtime. No Lambda cold starts, no container orchestration, no token streaming plumbing. Start a session and Anthropic runs the agent loop to completion.
• Browserbase owns the browser. No Chromium pinning, no fingerprint maintenance, no crashed-session cleanup. Every run gets a fresh, isolated sandbox with observability baked in.
• The split keeps state clean. Managed Agents holds the conversation and tool outputs. Browserbase holds the page, cookies, and downloads. You can inspect either side independently.

For the tradeoff against self-hosted Chromium, see Managed vs self-hosted.

Core concepts

Managed Agents is built around four primitives. You’ll see them throughout this integration.

Concept	Description
Agent	The model, system prompt, tools, MCP servers, and skills. Created once and referenced by ID.
Environment	A configured container template: pre-installed packages, mounted files, network rules.
Session	A running agent instance inside an environment, performing a task and producing events.
Events	Messages exchanged between your app and the agent: user turns, tool results, status updates.

How it works

1. Create the environment

   In the Anthropic console, create an environment with the browse npm package installed. Configure networking for the sites your agent needs to reach.

2. Add Browserbase credentials

   Create an environment-variable credential vault for BROWSERBASE_API_KEY so the agent can create and control Browserbase cloud sessions securely.

3. Create the agent

   Create a Managed Agent with shell tools enabled and a system prompt that tells Claude to use the browse CLI for browser work.

4. Start a session

   Start a session from the Anthropic console or CLI. Anthropic provisions the sandbox, loads the environment and credentials, and gets ready to run the loop.

5. Claude creates a Browserbase session

   Inside the sandbox, Claude uses browse from the Browse CLI to create and connect to a Browserbase cloud session.

6. Claude drives the browser

   Claude issues browse commands against the session (open, screenshot, snapshot, click, type) over CDP. You watch progress in Live View or surface events back to your own UI through the session event stream.

7. Claude returns the result

   When the agent goes idle, the session emits a session.status_idle event and Anthropic stops billing for compute. You end the Browserbase session (or let it time out) and surface the answer to the user.

What the stack looks like

Layer	Owner	Role
Agent loop, tool execution, conversation state	Anthropic Managed Agents	Runs Claude to completion in a sandbox
bash, file tools, custom tools	Anthropic Managed Agents	Built-in toolset, plus any custom tool you declare
browse CLI	Environment package (runs inside the sandbox)	Translates Claude’s intent into Browserbase/CDP actions
Chromium session, Live View, recordings	Browserbase	Isolated browser with observability and Agent Identity

When to use this

Use Managed Agents with Browserbase when:

• You want Claude to browse the web but don’t want to host the agent loop yourself.
• You need persistent conversation state across many tool calls (Slack bots, long research tasks, queued jobs).
• You want Anthropic-side tool-use traces for debugging alongside Browserbase session recordings.
• You’re building a chat surface (Slack, Discord, a web app) where each thread is a long-running agent session with steering.
• You’re already building a general-purpose Managed Agent and want to add web browsing as another capability alongside its existing tools.

Use a lighter setup (Stagehand or direct Messages API calls) when the task is one-shot, latency-sensitive, or you need full control over every tool call.

Getting started

Quickstart

Create a Managed Agent in the Anthropic console and give it Browserbase cloud browsing.

Browse CLI

The lightweight entry point Claude uses inside the sandbox to control Browserbase.

Further reading

Managed vs self-hosted

Why managed Browserbase sessions beat self-hosted Chromium in production.

Session Live View

Watch a Managed Agent drive a browser in real time.

Agent Identity

Verified browsers, proxies, and authentication for agents on the open web.