Google shipped four upgrades to Managed Agents in the Gemini API on July 7, and the headline isn’t any feature — it’s the price. The whole thing now runs on the free tier.
Quick recap: Managed Agents is an API where Google runs the agent for you inside a cloud sandbox — reasoning, code execution, package installs, file management. You send a task; you don’t build orchestration.
What actually changed
Pass background: true and the task runs server-side, async. The API hands back an interaction ID; your client polls, streams, or reconnects whenever. No babysitting an open HTTP connection through a 40-minute job. The sandbox now also connects straight to remote MCP servers — private databases, internal APIs, no proxy middleware — and you can mix custom function calling with MCP in the same interaction. Scoped credentials refresh mid-task without wiping sandbox state.
Why free tier is the real story
OpenAI charges for agent hosting. Anthropic gives you an SDK you run yourself. Google is giving the hosting away to win developer defaults — and notice that even Google now builds on MCP, Anthropic’s protocol. The standard war is over; the infra war just started.
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