Sleep

Pauses the agent for a bounded number of seconds. Cancelling the enclosing invocation aborts the sleep immediately rather than waiting for the full duration, so a long timer never ties up a session the caller has moved on from.

Supported in: Node.js, modern browsers (TypeScript); all platforms (Python).

The maximum duration is configurable at construction (default: 60 seconds) and cannot be raised by the model. Negative, NaN, infinite, non-numeric, and boolean durations are rejected at the tool boundary.

Example:

TypeScript
Python

import { Agent } from '@strands-agents/sdk'
import { sleep } from '@strands-agents/sdk/vended-tools/sleep'

const agent = new Agent({
  tools: [sleep],
})
await agent.invoke('Pause for two seconds, then continue.')

from strands import Agent
from strands.vended_tools import sleep

agent = Agent(tools=[sleep])
agent("Pause for two seconds, then continue.")

Custom maximum:

TypeScript
Python

import { Agent } from '@strands-agents/sdk'
import { makeSleep } from '@strands-agents/sdk/vended-tools/sleep'

const shortSleep = makeSleep({ maxDuration: 5 })
const agent = new Agent({ tools: [shortSleep] })

from strands import Agent
from strands.vended_tools import make_sleep

short_sleep = make_sleep(max_duration=5)
agent = Agent(tools=[short_sleep])

Full API reference