[dabla]

Depends on #74150 (async aget_conn / acreate_agent on PydanticAIHook), which must be merged first. This branch is built on top of it, so the diff shows its commits until then; only the last commit belongs to this PR. Draft until #74150 is in.

@task.agent cannot be used with an async def function today. The decorator calls the function without awaiting it, so the task fails in validate_prompt on the coroutine it gets back, while the operator already reports is_async through DecoratedOperator. An agent task therefore cannot await async hooks to build its prompt, and cannot share the event loop of an async task with other work, although the pydantic-ai agent behind it is async-native.

This makes AgentOperator a BaseAsyncOperator, the way PythonOperator is one:

• @task.agent on an async def function awaits it for the prompt and runs the agent on the task's event loop. A regular function keeps the synchronous path unchanged. AgentOperator.is_async is False; on the decorator it follows the function.
• AgentOperator.aexecute() awaits the agent run on the event loop (await agent.run() through CancellableAgentRunMixin.run_agent_async, same cancellation token as the sync run) and makes no blocking call to the supervisor on it: the hook comes from PydanticAIHook.aget_hook() and the agent from acreate_agent() (Add async aget_conn and acreate_agent to PydanticAIHook #74150), and the usage budget (aload / asave / aclear), the tool approval transcript and the XComs go through their async accessors.
• What has no async counterpart reuses the synchronous code from a worker thread: the connection lookup inside aget_hook(), the task state store before Airflow 3.4 (its async accessors are on main only, Add async task store accessors for async tasks #68232), the usage report of a failed run and the pause for a tool approval. Resuming after an approval stays synchronous.
• The template fields are rendered in a worker thread, since a template can read a Variable or a Connection with a blocking call.
• durable=True and enable_hitl_review=True do blocking I/O during the run (the durable storage inside the model and tool calls, the review poll loop) and are rejected with an async def function, at parse time on the decorator. They can follow in a later PR.
• axcom_push exists since Airflow 3.3.0; on 3.2 the XComs are pushed with xcom_push from a worker thread.

What it changes for performance. One agent run is not faster, its duration is the model's. The gain is in running many of them in one task process. Measured with pydantic-ai alone and a fake model that sleeps 1 s, one run per cell: a thread pool calling run_sync versus one event loop awaiting run.

Concurrent runs	Thread pool + run_sync	One loop + run	CPU, threads	CPU, loop
8	1.06 s	1.03 s	0.07 s	0.02 s
32	1.26 s	1.10 s	0.30 s	0.09 s
64	1.41 s	1.19 s	0.51 s	0.18 s
256	2.97 s	1.82 s	2.33 s	0.78 s

Tests. New tests cover run_agent_async (token held and cleared, on_kill cancelling an awaited run), the async usage budget methods and their fallback to the sync store before Airflow 3.4, UsageBudgetMixin._arun_tracked, aexecute with mocks and with a real FunctionModel run where every blocking state store call and xcom_push fails the test, the failed-run and tool-approval branches, the rejected features, the decorator with an async def function through both aexecute and execute, rendering off the event loop, and eight runs overlapping on one loop.

Run locally: the whole providers/common/ai/tests/unit suite (3104 passed, 13 skipped), and after the last round the touched modules again, mypy on the changed source files, and prek on the changed files. A backport of the same design to common.ai 0.9 also ran on a Celery worker with Airflow 3.3.2: one async @task.agent task, and eight agent runs sharing one event loop inside a single task, against an Azure OpenAI model, without a DeadlockImminentError.

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Was generative AI tooling used to co-author this PR?

• Yes — Claude Code (Fable 5.1)

Generated-by: Claude Code (Fable 5.1) following the guidelines

[github-actions]

The re-run of the jobs stopped by EC2 Spot interruptions finished: attempt 2 failed.

[kaxil]

This renders every template field a second time rather than only the prompt, and the context never gets the positional arguments. So the docstring's own example, analyze("x") returning "Answer: {{ question }}", fails here with UndefinedError while the sync path renders it. A message_history or op_kwargs value from an upstream XCom that contains {{ also gets evaluated as Jinja on this second pass. Could this mirror execute: merge call_arguments(...) into the context, then self.prompt = await asyncio.to_thread(self.render_template, self.prompt, context)? A test that calls the async function with a positional argument would pin it.

[kaxil]

And we actually just fixed it recenrtly on main

[kaxil]

The sync _complete_run calls _report_failed_run when the approval pause is refused (UnsupportedToolDeferralError, ToolApprovalAlreadyRequestedError), but here the error goes straight up. An async attempt that ends this way pushes no run_id/usage XCom, which the class docstring promises for a failed attempt. Should this get the same except BaseException guard, with _report_failed_run run in a thread?

[kaxil]

This only reads axcom_push, but on 3.2 _axcom_push falls back to xcom_push in a thread, so [seeded] and [opt-in] fail there. That is the red Compat 3.2.2 job. Collecting from both mocks would fix it, or skip this below 3.3 and add a test with the 3.3 flag patched off, which would also cover the fallback branch (it has no test yet).

[kaxil]

A mapped task still parses: the check is in __init__, which .expand() doesn't call until the task runs. Maybe say the task fails with a ValueError, or add the check on the mapped path too?

[kaxil]

Not quite with AgentSkillsToolset: its __aexit__ still calls xcom_pull/xcom_push synchronously on the loop thread. Could this sentence be narrowed to the operator's own calls, or that push moved to a thread?

[kaxil]

Nothing in-tree reaches this branch: AgentOperator.is_async is always False, and the decorator dispatches in its own execute. Could BaseAsyncOperator go on _AgentDecoratedOperator only, so the public operator's base classes don't change? Or is an async path for the plain operator planned?

[kaxil]

This also passes if _arun_tracked hands run_sync to asyncio.to_thread, since eight threads overlap just as well. Recording threading.get_ident() in slow and asserting it is the loop's thread would pin the one-loop claim.