AWS and OpenAI announced Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents in limited preview on April 28, 2026. AWS’s current developer guide labels the service a public preview. It uses OpenAI models for stateful agents, with model inference through Amazon Bedrock and tool execution in a customer-provided environment.
What Bedrock Managed Agents does
The service manages agent sessions and model interactions. A session retains context across messages and specifies a model, instructions, tools, an IAM role, and an execution environment. AWS describes the OpenAI agent harness at the service’s core as the Codex harness.
Reusable skills provide instructions an agent can draw on, while Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers can make additional tools available to it.
Where inference and tools run
Amazon Bedrock handles model inference. The tools an agent uses run in the execution environment the customer provides: either self-hosted compute or Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime. AWS presents AgentCore Runtime as the default compute environment, but customers can choose self-hosted compute instead.
That distinction matters when planning a deployment: the inference service and the environment that runs tools are separate parts of the setup. The session’s IAM role governs authorized operations, and customers configure the model, tools, instructions, and execution environment for each session.
US endpoints and model availability
AWS lists Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents endpoints in three US Regions:
- US East (N. Virginia) — us-east-1
- US West (Oregon) — us-west-2
- US East (Ohio) — us-east-2
Model availability can vary by Region and account, so an endpoint’s presence alone does not determine which models a particular account can use.
Usage charges and preview considerations
AWS charges for model inference and the AWS resources used by a deployment; its guide does not give one fixed price for Bedrock Managed Agents. The total depends on the inference and resources in use. In AWS’s AgentCore example, storage and networking can continue to incur charges even when no Bedrock Managed Agents turn is running.
AWS also warns that preview functionality and APIs can change. Deleting a Bedrock Managed Agents session does not delete files stored separately in a customer’s S3 bucket or on its host.
