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.
