On October 29, 2026, AWS let AI agents call Step Functions workflows as tools through Bedrock’s AgentCore gateway, over MCP. The agent decides when to trigger, the workflow runs each step in order — a way to make agentic AI governable and auditable without rewriting business logic.
On October 30, 2026, Amazon Bedrock made OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 models (Terra and Luna) available in AWS GovCloud (US) via the bedrock-runtime endpoint, with the Responses, Converse, and Chat Completions APIs. Cross-region inference routes requests between the two GovCloud regions to absorb load without moving data outside US borders.
In Q3 2026, AWS came within a whisker of $46 billion in quarterly revenue, up 39.3% year over year, and Andy Jassy said the cloud now installs an AI accelerator roughly every 14 seconds. Amazon’s CEO is steering AWS toward $1 trillion in revenue within five to ten years, with AI demand pulling core compute and storage along with it.
In late September 2026, AWS launched Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI in public preview — an AWS-native version of OpenAI’s Agents API that runs agents inside your account with your identities and guardrails. If you want OpenAI agents without letting your data leave your AWS perimeter, this is the shortest path.
On September 15, 2026, AWS and Salesforce expanded their partnership to push CRM data and AI agents into the tools teams already use every day: Amazon Quick, Slack, and voice. Access is zero-copy — no migration, no duplication — with model choice through Amazon Bedrock.
On September 21, 2026 AWS released Strands Harness, an open-source AI agent that bundles tools, context, and memory, and claims a 45% cost saving over Claude Code and Codex. Teams that pay for tokens by volume can evaluate it without depending on AWS infrastructure.
On August 19, 2026, AWS added an external_web_access parameter to Web Search on Amazon Bedrock, letting agents pull content live from the public web. The lock is an IAM permission, and the default is open.
Announced at AWS Summit New York on August 7, 2026, AgentCore Runtime Instances bring persistent, stateful compute to Bedrock agents, removing the cold start penalty that plagued real-time deployments. If your AI agents take more than three seconds to respond, the bottleneck is your infrastructure — and AWS just fixed it.
