At Google I/O, the company unveiled Managed Agents in its Gemini API — a service that promises to collapse weeks of agent deployment work into a single API call. It’s also a sign that Google believes its ecosystem, including the newly launched Antigravity CLI, is ready to own the execution layer end-to-end.Before a single agent is written, teams are already spending days on the unglamorous work: standing up execution environments, managing sandboxes, wiring tool call infrastructure. Model providers like Anthropic have launched platforms to handle much of that work — but Google’s approach is different.Google said in a blog post that Managed Agents in the Gemini API abstracts “away the complexity so that you can focus on your product experience and agent behavior.” The service is available in preview via new custom templates in Google AI Studio.The growth has introduced a real architectural question: should agent management live at the execution layer — embedded in the model or its harness — or at the infrastructure layer, as a separate runtime?Comparing Google’s approachUntil recently, agent orchestration relied on frameworks that sat above the model, directing agents and letting teams control routing and execution separately. That layer is now being absorbed by the platforms themselves.Recent platforms like Claude Managed Agents embed orchestration at the model layer rather than on a separate runtime platform. The idea is that the model owns the reasoning and orchestration layers, and enterprises have control over execution. AWS, through new capabilities on Bedrock AgentCore, adds managed harnesses that stitch together the upfront tasks for deploying agents. Google’s approach goes further, optimizing the model, harness, and sandbox together and running everything in secure Google-managed environments.René Sultan of Ramp, cited in Google’s announcement, said the shift is concrete: “The real shift with Gemini Managed Agents is that the agent runtime moves into the platform. With the sandbox, infrastructure and execution loop …
