Anthropic's developer account shipped two Claude Managed Agents updates within a day of each other in September 2026 — one for watching what a running agent is doing, and one for deciding whether it should be allowed to do it. Together they round out the ant CLI's coverage of the Managed Agents lifecycle: define with ant apply, run it, watch it with the new session viewer, and let auto mode handle routine approvals along the way.
TL;DR
| Feature | What it does | Command / trigger |
|---|---|---|
| Session viewer | Attach your terminal (or browser) to a running Managed Agents session | ant beta:sessions connect, add --web for a localhost UI |
| Auto mode | Reviews each tool call against your stated intent, then runs, denies, or asks | Enabled as a Managed Agents setting |
The session viewer: watching a running agent live
ant beta:sessions connect attaches your terminal directly to a Managed Agents session that's already running, rather than only being able to inspect logs after the fact. Add the --web flag and instead of a terminal attachment, it opens a web UI served from localhost — a browser-based view of the same live session, useful for anyone who'd rather watch a running agent's activity in a UI than scroll a terminal stream.
This sits next to the Console session viewer redesign Anthropic shipped in August 2026, which added a timeline minimap and per-thread cost inspector to the hosted Console — that's a post-hoc review surface for sessions after they run; ant beta:sessions connect is the live, CLI-native equivalent for watching one as it happens.
Auto mode: intent-based tool call review
The second update brings auto mode to Claude Managed Agents. With it enabled, Claude reviews each tool call an agent is about to make, checks it against the intent expressed in your user.message events, and decides to run the tool call, deny it, or ask you for input — rather than surfacing every single tool call for manual approval by default.
It's worth being precise about naming here, because Anthropic already shipped something called "auto mode" in August 2026: Claude Code's default auto mode for Pro, Max, and Team plans, where a safety classifier screens tool calls in the interactive coding CLI — in Anthropic's own controlled study, that classifier caught 89% of planted dangerous commands versus a 13.6% human catch rate. This new Managed Agents auto mode uses the same run/deny/ask decision shape, but judges calls against your stated intent in a longer-running, more autonomous background agent context rather than screening for generically dangerous commands in an interactive session. Same pattern, different product, different judgment criteria — don't assume one write-up covers both.
What people are asking
Reactions on the announcement thread ranged from feature requests to access confusion — worth addressing directly:
"Can we use our subscription, or do we need an API key?" A developer replied to the announcement specifically asking this, noting docs they'd seen pointed to API-key-based access rather than a standard Claude subscription. Anthropic's announcement doesn't resolve this directly — check current Claude Managed Agents documentation for the authoritative answer on billing and access for these beta commands.
"I wish computer use worked in VS Code, not just the Claude app." A separate reply raised this as a workflow gap — the session viewer and auto mode both ship as ant CLI and Managed Agents features, not IDE-integrated ones, so this specific request isn't addressed by either update.
Is ant beta:sessions connect stable? The beta: prefix in the command itself signals Anthropic doesn't consider it finished — expect the interface to change before it graduates out of beta, the same caution that applies to any ant beta:* subcommand.
The bottom line
These two updates target different failure modes in running Managed Agents: the session viewer solves "I can't see what my agent is doing right now," and auto mode solves "I don't want to manually approve every tool call, but I still want a checkpoint that isn't a rubber stamp." Combined with ant apply's declarative agent definitions from earlier in September, the ant CLI is quickly becoming the same kind of infrastructure-as-code surface for agents that Terraform is for cloud resources — define it, run it, watch it, and let policy handle the routine approvals.
Command names, behavior, and dates above reflect Anthropic's September 10-11, 2026 announcement — check Anthropic's official developer documentation for the current, non-beta command syntax as these features mature.
Related reading
- Function Hooks and ant apply: Claude Code's Terraform moment
- Claude Managed Agents: memory, domain controls, and a new Console
- Auto mode becomes the default in Claude Code for Pro, Max, and Team
- How ABC Legal runs 50+ Claude Managed Agents as code
- Claude Community Build Days: Fable 5.1 buildathons worldwide
- Claude Code permission modes explained
- Official: ClaudeDevs announcement on X