Bedrock AgentCore upgrades

Amazon Web Services has added a managed harness and a new command-line tool to Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, cutting agent setup to three application programming interface calls. (aws.amazon.com) AgentCore is Amazon’s managed service for running artificial intelligence agents — software that can call tools, keep context and complete multi-step tasks — across different models and frameworks. AWS said the new harness now assembles compute, tools, memory, identity and security from configuration instead of custom orchestration code. (docs.aws.amazon.com, aws.amazon.com) AWS also made the AgentCore CLI its recommended path for new projects. The company’s documentation says the tool scaffolds agent projects, deploys them to AgentCore Runtime, supports local development with hot reload, and includes built-in evaluations and gateway management. (docs.aws.amazon.com, aws.github.io) The change targets a problem that has slowed enterprise agent projects: teams often spend days wiring up authentication, session handling and tool connections before they can test whether an agent is useful. AWS said the managed harness moves that work behind the service so developers can swap models or add tools as configuration changes. (aws.amazon.com, docs.aws.amazon.com) That model-switching pitch is central to Bedrock’s strategy. AWS says AgentCore works with “any framework and model,” a position aimed at companies that do not want their agent logic tied to one model vendor or one orchestration stack. (docs.aws.amazon.com) AWS is also trying to turn AgentCore from a developer tool into a production platform. Its developer guide says AgentCore Runtime handles scaling, session management, security isolation and infrastructure management, while built-in identity can connect agents to systems such as Okta, Microsoft Entra ID and Amazon Cognito. (docs.aws.amazon.com, docs.aws.amazon.com) Choice Hotels said on April 20 that it is standardizing on AWS AgentCore as part of an enterprise-wide artificial intelligence rollout. The company said the system will be used across guest discovery and booking, hotel operations and distribution. (prnewswire.com, hoteldive.com) AWS is also pushing AgentCore into the standards layer around agents. On March 10, the company said AgentCore Runtime added support for stateful Model Context Protocol server features, and Bedrock product leader Luca Chang said at the 2026 MCP Summit that AWS’s work on Bedrock is feeding back into the protocol’s development. (aws.amazon.com, thenewstack.io) The result is a more opinionated Bedrock stack: less hand-built plumbing at the start, more Amazon-managed infrastructure underneath, and a stronger link to the tool-connection standard emerging around artificial intelligence agents. (aws.amazon.com, thenewstack.io)