September 2026 Updates for AWS AI Builders

In September 2026 AWS announced a set of updates to Amazon Bedrock, Bedrock AgentCore, and the open‑source Strands toolkit. Bedrock Managed Agents, now in public preview, lets developers build production‑ready agents with OpenAI models while keeping data inside AWS, reusing IAM permissions and providing CloudTrail auditability. The AgentCore runtime received more efficient memory handling and lower cold‑start latency, enabling serverless agents to run with pay‑as‑you‑go pricing and automatic scaling to zero. Strands introduced a new harness that reduces token usage by 28 % and a lightweight 2‑billion‑parameter Decider model that returns decisions in about 115 ms locally.

The model catalog also expanded. OpenAI’s Astra, Sol and Luna families are generally available on Bedrock, with Astra supporting up to one‑million‑token inputs and an Ultrafast tier that claims up to six times faster inference. Additional models include Claude Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 and xAI’s Grok 4.6/4.7, offering varied context lengths and performance trade‑offs. Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base added scheduled sync options and native connectors for ServiceNow, Confluence Data Center, Salesforce and Zendesk, simplifying enterprise data ingestion.