Claude Managed Agents

Managed Agents are agents Anthropic hosts, with a managed sandbox — the alternative to running the Agent SDK on your own infrastructure.

Billing has a second dimension

Everything else on the platform is billed per token. Managed Agents adds session runtime:

SKU	Rate	Metered on
Session runtime	$0.08 per session-hour	Time in running status

Runtime is measured to the millisecond and accrues only while the session is running. Time spent idle — waiting for your next message or a tool confirmation — rescheduling, or terminated does not count.

That detail matters for interactive agents: a session a user leaves open costs nothing while it waits.

Session runtime replaces container-hour billing for the code execution tool; you are not charged both.

A worked example, from the documentation

A one-hour Opus 5 coding session using 50,000 input and 15,000 output tokens:

Line item	Cost
Input tokens	$0.25
Output tokens	$0.375
Session runtime	$0.08
Total	$0.705

With prompt caching, where 40,000 of the input tokens are cache reads, the same session costs $0.525 — caching removes roughly a quarter of the total.

What does not apply

Modifier	Why not
Batch API discount	Sessions are stateful and interactive
Partner cloud pricing	Not available on Bedrock or Google Cloud

Fast mode pricing does apply when an agent’s model.speed is "fast", and the inference_geo: "us" 1.1x multiplier applies to session tokens.