The Intake — Wednesday, May 20, 2026

Managed Agents can now reach private MCP servers — internal databases, APIs, knowledge bases, ticketing systems — through a customer-deployed gateway. That gateway opens a single outbound encrypted connection to Anthropic infrastructure. No inbound firewall rules. No public endpoints required. The feature is called MCP tunnels and is released in limited research preview; access requires a request.

The second addition moves tool execution off Anthropic infrastructure entirely. Self-hosted sandboxes, released in public beta, let operators run that execution layer in a customer-controlled environment. The bring-your-own option is available, as are four named partner providers. Cloudflare covers microVMs and zero-trust networking. Daytona handles long-running stateful environments over SSH or preview URLs. Modal targets CPU and GPU allocation for AI-focused workloads. Vercel provides sandbox isolation with VPC peering and credential injection.

The agent loop — orchestration, context management, and error recovery — remains on Anthropic's infrastructure under both features. Practitioners building with Managed Agents now have two concrete paths — MCP tunnels (limited research preview, access by request) for private MCP server connectivity, and self-hosted sandboxes (public beta) for tool execution in a customer-controlled environment.