AWS Adds OpenAI GPT-6.1 Sol and Claude Sonnet 5.5 to Bedrock, Launches Managed Agents Preview

New Frontier Models on Amazon Bedrock

AWS expanded its model catalog on Amazon Bedrock with several new frontier models. OpenAI GPT-6.1 Sol is an upgrade to GPT-6 Sol, delivering strong performance on agentic coding and computer use. According to OpenAI, it approaches GPT-6 Astra performance at roughly one-fifth of the cost. Additionally, OpenAI GPT-6 Astra gained an UltraFast mode, a premium speed tier offering up to 6x faster inference and 300 tokens per second.

Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5.5 is also now available, positioned as a smarter, more efficient step up from Sonnet 5 for coding and well-scoped tasks. SpaceXAI Grok 4.7 joins the lineup with improved mixed-document handling and repo-scale coding capabilities.

Bedrock Managed Agents Preview

AWS announced a public preview of Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI. This service is built on a customized version of OpenAI’s Agents API, engineered to be AWS-native. It allows developers to build agents optimized for OpenAI models that run entirely inside AWS, leveraging existing identities, permissions, and governance controls. Users can choose between self-hosted compute or Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime for managed sessions.

Other AWS Launches and Updates

• AWS Well-Architected Agent (preview): An AI-powered service that analyzes AWS environments to provide contextual recommendations for cost, security, and performance.
• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL: Now supports direct querying of Apache Iceberg and Parquet data, eliminating the need for ETL pipelines.
• Amazon S3 Tables: Added support for all Apache Iceberg V3 data types, including geometry, geography, and nanosecond timestamps.
• Kiro workflows: Enables complex multi-agent tasks with less supervision, used internally to build Kiro itself.
• Strands Decider 2B: A small, open-source decision model optimized for fast experimentation and local development.

Service Lifecycle Changes

Several AWS services are moving through lifecycle stages as of September 29, 2026:

• Maintenance (no new customers from Oct 29, 2026): Amazon Chime SDK SIP Media Application, Amazon WorkSpaces Secure Browser.
• Sunset: Amazon Managed Blockchain (end of support Sept 29, 2027), Amazon DevOps Guru (end of support Sept 30, 2027), AWS Backint Agent for SAP ASE (end of support Sept 29, 2027), and AWS Infrastructure Composer (standalone console end of support Dec 7, 2026).
• End of Support: Amazon Mechanical Turk.