[Bug] Harness Browser: Live View "Take control"/"Release" breaks the agent's automation on SSO handback (workaround: interact without Take control + reconnect)

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
aws, python

Research direction

Start by reproducing the two Live View paths with the managed Harness, agentcore_browser, and an SSO flow, then compare the CloudWatch DEFAULT-log-group traces. Inspect the take-control/release-control handoff and session reconnect behavior. Done means automation survives the cycle, or the supported workaround and profileConfiguration limitation are clearly documented.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Summary (corrected after further testing)

On a managed AgentCore Harness with the built-in Browser tool, you can let a human complete an interactive SSO login (e.g. IAM Identity Center / a federated QuickSight console where the OTP arrives by email) in Live View and then have the agent continue in the same authenticated sessionbut only if you avoid the Live View "Take control" / "Release control" toggle.

  • Broken path: human clicks Take control, completes the SSO+OTP login, clicks Release control, then the agent resumes. → The agent's automation context is destroyed. Every subsequent automation call returns Target page, context or browser has been closed, and shortly after the backend reports it is gone (not initialized / "all sessions are gone"). The authenticated session is unrecoverable. Reproduced across 3 orchestration strategies (concurrent polling, blind hands-off, signal-gated hands-off where the agent provably never touched the browser during the human's control).
  • Working path (workaround): human interacts in Live View without clicking Take control (types the OTP / completes login directly), then the agent, on resume, does NOT reuse its pre-login page handle — it reconnects / re-reads the current page (e.g. via evaluate / re-navigate). → The authenticated state carries over; the agent lands on the authenticated console and proceeds normally. Verified end to end against a real QuickSight Enterprise console.

So the issue is specifically: the documented Live View take-over/release-control feature does not cleanly hand control back to the managed-harness agent's automation (it tears down the automation context), even though the dev guide presents take/release control as a feature ("interactive controls to take over or release control from automation").

Environment

  • boto3 1.43.29 (bedrock-agentcore-control + bedrock-agentcore), managed Harness (CreateHarness/InvokeHarness), browser aws.browser.v1, networkMode: PUBLIC, region us-east-1.
  • Tools: agentcore_browser + agentcore_code_interpreter + inline functions; allowedTools: ["*"].

Repro (both paths)

  1. Harness with agentcore_browser; invoke a task that navigates to an SSO-gated console URL. Agent lands on the sign-in page (expected).
  2. Open the session's Live View.
    • (broken) Click Take control → complete SSO+OTP → Release control → agent resumes → context dead.
    • (works) Do not click Take control; complete the login directly in the stream → then the agent reconnects (re-reads the page rather than reusing the old handle) → authenticated session carries over.

Asks

  1. Is the Take control → Release control path intended to hand control back to the harness agent's automation? If so, the teardown is a bug; if not, please document that interacting without Take control (plus an automation reconnect) is the supported human-assisted-auth pattern.
  2. Could the automation context survive a take/release cycle so the documented feature works for the managed harness?
  3. Separately: the harness agentcore_browser tool config only accepts browserArn (no profileConfiguration), so a pre-saved authenticated browser profile cannot be attached as an alternative to interactive login. A profileConfiguration passthrough would help.

Happy to share CloudWatch DEFAULT-log-group traces for both the broken and working runs.

Dominant language
Python
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Merged PRs (30d)
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