Claude Managed Agents session budgets: prove the hard stop before unattended runs
Quick answer
On August 7, 2026, Anthropic added hard per-session budgets to Claude Managed Agents. A budget is a US-dollar ceiling, written as whole cents, that the platform enforces against the session's public-list-price cost. When the cap is reached, the session pauses with the session-level stop reason budget_reached; it does not terminate. Raising or removing the budget resumes the paused work automatically.
This is an API-level Claude Managed Agents feature. It is not a Claude Code subscription meter, and it is different from the Messages API's advisory, token-denominated task budgets.
Do not treat the number as an exact final invoice or a mid-request kill switch. Enforcement happens between model requests. An in-flight request finishes, so one request per active thread can take the recorded list cost past the cap. Use the rollout below to prove event ordering, overshoot, blocked new work, and resume authority before trusting the cap on unattended agents.
