AWS Weekly Roundup: GPT-6.1 Terra on Bedrock, Step Functions as agent tools, and more (November 2, 2026)

OpenAI GPT-6.1 Terra is generally available on Amazon Bedrock, priced at least 50% lower than GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-5.6 Terra, with support for up to 1 million input tokens.
AWS Step Functions workflows are now available as AI agent tools through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway, allowing agents to trigger existing Standard and Express workflows via the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
AWS Key Management Service now supports ML-KEM for post-quantum key encapsulation using FIPS 140-3 Level 3 validated HSMs, while Amazon ECS supports GPU sharing with NVIDIA Multi-Process Service (MPS).
AWS Lambda supports Seekable OCI (SOCI) lazy loading, reducing container startup time by up to 70%, and Amazon EKS Auto Mode now supports Kubernetes Gateway API for traffic management.

Performance and Cost

GPT-6.1 Terra scored 15 percentage points higher than GPT-5.6 Terra on OpenAI’s Agents’ Last Exam evaluation and completed tasks more than three times faster than both.
The model is accessible via Bedrock APIs, ChatGPT Work, and Codex.

AWS IAM Identity Center supports cross-Region trusted identity propagation, allowing user identity to travel with requests across Regions without broad IAM roles.
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL added post-quantum TLS key exchange on versions 18 and higher.
Amazon EKS Auto Mode provisions and manages AWS load balancing infrastructure for Gateway and HTTPRoute resources, supporting HTTP and gRPC routing.

Nubank used the AWS DevOps Agent to cut disaster recovery test cycles from 4.3 hours to 40 minutes and quadrupled flow coverage to more than 160.
MoEngage exposed roughly 400 internal API operations as agent tools via AgentCore Gateway, saving an estimated six months of platform engineering time.