A recap of the biggest Amazon Bedrock, AgentCore, and Strands updates from August 2026.

At AWS, we have long focused on making foundational technologies accessible and providing the infrastructure needed to put them to work. Amazon Bedrock, used by more than 225,000 active customers, including over 80% of Fortune 100 companies, embodies that commitment by providing access to leading models and a broad set of tools to build and scale AI, with the security, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency customers need in production. As agentic applications expand, Amazon Bedrock extends this foundation with AgentCore, which lets you build, connect, and optimize agents using any framework and model. AWS also released the Strands Agent Harness SDK as open source, giving you the flexibility to create agents and deploy them wherever you choose. Together, they help you turn model intelligence into production agents without limiting how those agents are built or where they run.

As models become more capable, organizations can ask a more ambitious question: how much meaningful work can AI take on from start to finish? Across industries, agents are moving into workflows that require them to reason over enterprise information, remain productive over longer time horizons, and act across digital and physical systems. As the scope of that work expands, attention is shifting to the complete system around the model, including what context it can access, what actions it can take, where data is processed, and how its decisions and costs are governed.