Claude’s Managed Agents are getting a major upgrade. Starting today, the public beta adds cron scheduling and a credential vault — two features that make it easier to run automated workflows without worrying about server management or API key leaks.
With cron, developers can set up recurring tasks like data syncs, security scans, and daily summaries — all running in their own sessions without manual intervention.
The vault, meanwhile, brings environment variable support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and CLI tools, providing sandboxed authorization. When an agent makes a network request, the real API key is dynamically attached at a domain whitelist gateway — the model itself only ever sees a placeholder. That’s a solid defense against prompt injection attacks. Update a credential in the vault and running agents automatically hot-reload the new value on the next call.
Notion, Browserbase, and KERNEL have already integrated with the vault. Browserbase and KERNEL also bring sandboxed browser and network interactions to Managed Agents for the first time.
On the enterprise side, Rakuten uses scheduled deployments to analyze spreadsheets and auto-generate slide decks. Actively AI regularly refreshes multi-account search results for sales teams. Ando monitors channels and sends deadline reminders. Notion deployed a dedicated CLI tool for secure file uploads, without exposing any file credentials to the model.