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Claude Managed Agents is Anthropic’s hosted agent harness: you define an agent once, then start as many cloud sessions as you need, each running in an isolated Anthropic-managed sandbox. By pairing Claude Managed Agents with Kernel, your agents can browse the Web the way a person would. Kernel handles the work to spin up real browsers for the agent to engage with (including rendered pages, computer-use clicks, screenshots). The browsers are provisioned and controlled through the Kernel CLI from inside Anthropic’s Managed Agents sandbox. Agents can fan out across many browsers in parallel, with no browser infrastructure to run yourself. This integration combines Claude’s hosted agent runtime with Kernel’s cloud browsers. Claude Managed Agents owns the runtime — it runs the agent loop in an Anthropic-managed sandbox with bash, file tools, and any custom tools you declare. Kernel owns the browser — a fresh, isolated, stealth Chromium session per run that the agent drives to load, read, and act on real pages. Each side handles what it’s best at, and you operate neither.
This is different from the Claude Agent SDK integration. The Agent SDK is a library you run on your own machine or deploy as a Kernel app. Managed Agents is Anthropic’s hosted harness — agents, sessions, environments, and vaults all live on Anthropic’s side, and the agent reaches Kernel over the network. Use this page when you want Anthropic to host the agent loop.
Claude Managed Agents is in beta — every request carries the managed-agents-2026-04-01 beta header, which the Anthropic SDKs set automatically. The environment_variable vault credential used below is a narrower research preview; request access to enable it. Preview identifiers may change before general availability.

Benefits of using Kernel with Claude Managed Agents

  • No infrastructure to run: Anthropic hosts the agent loop and Kernel hosts the browsers — no cold starts, container orchestration, or Chromium version pinning on your side.
  • Clean separation of state: Managed Agents holds the conversation and tool outputs; Kernel holds the page, cookies, and downloads — so you can inspect each side on its own.
  • Parallel by default: fan out one browser per subagent and run them concurrently, so a single coordinator can cover many pages at once.
  • Stealth, non-headless browsing: stealth mode drives real Chromium that renders and behaves like a human visitor, not a flagged bot.
  • Managed Authentication: Claude Managed Agents can seamlessly access browsers on behalf of users using Kernel’s secure, permissioned abstraction of user identity.
  • Persistent session state: carry cookies and logins across runs with Profiles, so agents resume where they left off.
  • Built-in observability: watch agents drive their browsers live with Live View, or review a run afterward with session replays.

How it works

A Managed Agents + Kernel setup has two kinds of resources:
  • Durable resources, created once and reused across runs:
    • an environment — the cloud sandbox the agent runs in, with the Kernel CLI preinstalled and outbound networking locked down,
    • a vault holding your KERNEL_API_KEY as a credential,
    • one or more agents — the system prompt, model, and tools that define behavior.
  • Sessions, which are ephemeral. Each session opens against an agent, attaches the vault, runs one task while you stream its events, and is deleted when done.
Inside a session, the agent uses its built-in shell to run the Kernel CLI — e.g. kernel browsers create --stealth, kernel browsers playwright execute, kernel browsers computer … — to provision and drive cloud browsers.

Prerequisites

  • Node.js 18+ and the Anthropic TypeScript SDK (@anthropic-ai/sdk).
  • ANTHROPIC_API_KEY: get from the Anthropic Console. Drives vaults, agents, and sessions.
  • KERNEL_API_KEY: get from the Kernel Dashboard. Stored in the vault and injected into the sandbox as a placeholder.
  • Early-access enrollment in Claude Managed Agents (including the environment_variable vault credential feature).
The example code below is TypeScript. The same API is exposed through the Anthropic SDKs for other languages under their beta namespace as Managed Agents rolls out.

Quickstart

The complete, runnable version of this quickstart lives in the Claude Managed Agents + Kernel cookbook, alongside more recipes for parallel computer-use agent swarms.
1

Create the environment

The environment is the sandbox your agent runs in. Preinstall the Kernel CLI so workers can run kernel … immediately, and apply the environment-networking firewall from above.
2

Store the Kernel API key in a vault

Create a vault, then add KERNEL_API_KEY as an environment_variable credential. The credential’s networking block is the substitution allowlist — the real key is only injected into requests to these hosts.
3

Define the agents

Give the worker a system prompt that drives Kernel browsers via the CLI, and disable web_fetch so it can only see a page through a real browser. Add a coordinator whose multiagent roster delegates to the worker for parallel runs.
4

Open a session and stream it

Create a session against the coordinator with the environment and vault attached, send the task, and stream events until the session goes idle. Every subagent thread inherits the vault, so each can use KERNEL_API_KEY.
Open the printed session URL to watch the agent — and its parallel subagents — drive their Kernel browsers live.
5

Tear down

Settle the session before deleting it (the idle event fires just before the status flips, so an immediate delete can 400), then delete it. Deleting the vault cascades to its credentials; environments delete directly. Agents have no delete — archive is the terminal state.

Next steps