AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Sonnet 4.6 on Amazon Bedrock, Kiro in GovCloud Regions, New Agent Plugins, and More (February 23, 2026)

AWS shared a roundup of last week's announcements. The highlights are that Claude Sonnet 4.6 is now available on Amazon Bedrock, and Kiro has expanded to AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 delivers frontier performance across coding, agentic, and professional work, aiming for intelligence close to Opus 4.6 at a lower cost. It is described as well-suited for large-scale coding and knowledge work.

Last week's list of releases also includes the following.

• Amazon EC2 Hpc8a instances: Based on 5th Gen AMD EPYC, offering up to 40% improved performance, higher memory bandwidth, and 300 Gbps EFA networking.
• Amazon SageMaker Inference for custom Amazon Nova models: Enables fine-grained control over instance types, autoscaling policies, and concurrency settings when deploying custom Nova models.
• Nested virtualization on virtual EC2 instances: Allows running KVM or Hyper-V on virtual EC2 instances to create nested virtual machines.
• Amazon Aurora: Automatically applies server-side encryption by default using AWS-owned keys to new DB clusters.
• Kiro in GovCloud: Enables regulated environments and government mission teams to use Kiro's agentic AI tools within their security control requirements.

Additional updates include the introduction of Agent Plugins for AWS. Open-source plugins help coding agents assist with AWS deployment tasks, and the deploy-on-aws plugin directly supports architecture recommendations, cost estimation, and Infrastructure as Code generation.

Also covered were methods for verifying correct AI system behavior using automated reasoning, and best practices for deploying the AWS DevOps Agent in production. The AWS DevOps Agent has handled thousands of escalations and shown an 86%+ root cause identification rate based on internal estimates.

From the community, the roundup featured an AWS guide for preparing for a first developer job, an AI agent-based job search, and a project building AWS Serverless Power for Kiro. Upcoming events include AWS Summits (Paris, London, Bengaluru), the Amazon Nova AI Hackathon, and AWS Community Days in Ahmedabad, Tokyo, Chennai, Slovakia, Pune, and more.