We shipped four updates to Claude Managed Agents this week. First, you can now s

A session budget gives a Claude Managed Agents session a hard dollar ceiling, and reaching it pauses the work instead of ending it. Anthropic announced on August 7 that sessions hitting the limit stop with a `budget_reached` event and resume when the budget is raised. Managed Agents runs Claude as a long-running agent in a hosted sandbox, where one task can involve many model requests, web searches and hours of running time.

The current budget documentation explains what is counted. The platform prices model tokens at each model's list price, web searches at $10 per 1,000 and session running time at $0.08 per hour. That total is list cost, not the customer's contracted price, so an organization with negotiated discounts may be billed less than the cap. The check happens before each model request. A request already admitted runs to completion, along with the tool calls in its response, so the final total can land slightly past the cap; the documentation's example is a 50-cent budget pausing at 53 cents.

A paused session keeps its history and sandbox. While paused it accepts only events that settle work already in progress, such as tool results, and rejects new user messages. Raising or removing the budget resumes the paused work automatically, but removal is one-way: a session whose budget has been removed cannot be given a new one. A budget can only be attached when a session is created, so the cap has to be chosen before the agent starts.