There’s a particular energy to mid-September in New York. Pumpkin spice lattes are flowing, temperatures are dropping, and it’s nearly sweater weather. The city is back at full speed, and so is the AWS launch calendar. This week that energy showed up in a new frontier model on Amazon Bedrock, a desktop app for Amazon Quick, and a reminder that the developers seeing the biggest gains from AI agents aren’t just using better tools — they’re working differently.

Let’s dive in.

Headlines
OpenAI GPT-6 Astra is now generally available on Amazon Bedrock – GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI’s latest and most capable model to date, and you can now run it on Amazon Bedrock. It brings deeper reasoning and judgment, professional-quality writing and design, and advanced computer and browser use to demanding business workflows. The model supports a context window of up to 1 million input tokens, so you can send it large codebases, long contracts, or extensive document collections and ask it to reconcile competing inputs.

You can call GPT-6 Astra through supported Amazon Bedrock APIs, or configure ChatGPT Work and Codex to use the model on Amazon Bedrock. Alongside the launch, OpenAI is introducing new enterprise plugins for ChatGPT Work that extend Astra’s browser-use capabilities across common business applications. Established AWS controls help you secure workloads, govern access, and audit model invocation activity, and your inference data isn’t used for model training. Read more

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:

• Amazon Quick desktop app is now generally available on macOS and Windows – The Amazon Quick desktop app brings Amazon Quick to your computer, where it can work with local files and stay connected to your calendar, email, and business apps in the background. Conversations, context, and agents stay synchronized across desktop and mobile, so work you start on one surface carries over to the other. With this release, Quick agents also keep running after you close your computer, which means you can start a long-running task before you leave the office, add input from the mobile app on the way home, and review the result when you get there. Existing Quick users can download the desktop app, and the mobile app is available from the Apple App Store and Google Play. Read more
• AWS Lambda now supports a 90-minute function timeout on Lambda Managed Instances – You can now configure a function timeout of up to 90 minutes for asynchronous and event source mapping (ESM) invocations on Lambda Managed Instances, a 6x increase from the previous 15-minute limit. That opens the door to data processing, media transcoding, financial calculations, AI inference, and batch jobs that need longer continuous execution, without splitting the work across multiple functions. Synchronous invocations keep the existing 15-minute maximum. The longer timeout also applies to steps inside Lambda durable functions, which can still run for up to a year when invoked asynchronously. Read more
• Amazon EBS Volume Clones now copies volumes across accounts – Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Volume Clones can now copy a volume into another AWS account and re-encrypt it with an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key in the target account. If you keep production and development in separate accounts, you can share a volume with AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) and let the target account create a fresh copy in the same Availability Zone, for example, cloning a production database volume into an isolated development account. Cross-account copy works for all volume types, including unencrypted volumes and volumes encrypted with customer managed keys. Read more
• Second-generation single-rack AWS Outposts is now generally available – The new single-rack AWS Outposts is a self-contained 42U rack that puts compute, storage, and networking into one compact unit for locations that need low latency, local data processing, or data residency, and don’t have room for a larger footprint. A single rack delivers up to 2,688 vCPU and 100 TB of Amazon EBS storage, and supports the latest x86-powered Amazon EC2 instances, including general purpose (M7i, M8i), compute-optimized (C7i, C8i), memory-optimized (R7i, R8i), and Outposts accelerated networking instances. You get the same APIs, console, automation, governance, and security controls as multi-rack Outposts and AWS Regions. Read more
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now available on v0 by Vercel – You can now describe a search or AI application in natural language inside v0 by Vercel and get a full-stack app backed by Amazon OpenSearch Serverless. v0 provisions a collection, indexes your data, and uses the OpenSearch Serverless endpoint for full-text search and vector search for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workloads, without leaving the v0 interface. OpenSearch Serverless scales capacity up and down for you, so you can focus on the application instead of cluster management. You can provision under a new AWS account or link an existing one. Read more
• AWS Transform for .NET modernization is now generally available via CLI – You can trigger an AWS-managed .NET modernization in AWS Transform custom with a single CLI command, then run it interactively or script it into an existing pipeline. The CLI sits alongside the existing AWS Transform for .NET experiences in the web application, Visual Studio IDE, Kiro Power, and MCP agents. Use it to upgrade language versions, migrate frameworks, optimize performance, and analyze codebases with transformations you can run as-is or customize. The .NET modernization transformation includes 50,000 free agent minutes per month. Read more

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional posts and resources that you might find interesting:

• Clare Liguori on frontier engineering – If you already use an AI coding assistant but don’t feel like you’re shipping much faster, start here. Clare Liguori, Senior Principal Engineer at AWS, published a practitioner’s manifesto on frontier engineering: ten principles, drawn from teams across Amazon, for changing how you build software with AI agents. The argument is direct. Software development has split in two, people who changed how they work with agents, and people who only changed their coding tools. Frontier engineering is not vibe coding. You spend the first weeks writing steering files, refactoring the codebase, and learning to decompose work for agents. Those weeks feel slower. The weeks after feel dramatically faster, because you’re no longer building the software directly — you’re building the agent setup that builds the software.
• A free year of Kiro for students around the world – The Kiro Students program is expanding from 11 universities to 121 new schools across 16 countries. Eligible students get one year of Kiro with 1,000 credits per month and full access to paid features such as premium models and Kiro Web, no credit card and no trial timer. You can work in the IDE, the CLI, Kiro Web in a browser, or Kiro Crew. If you’re a student, sign up with your university email.
• The state of AI for security: measuring what matters for trust – Security teams are using AI for triage, threat modeling, incident response, and code review, but a tool that flags everything doesn’t save time. In The state of AI for security, Anshumali Shrivastava and Neha Rungta introduce Deception Benchmark, a new evaluation that tests whether a model can tell a real vulnerability from code that looks risky but is actually safe. The benchmark includes 14,822 samples across 16 languages and more than 70 Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) categories. Under standard prompting, precision landed in the mid-50s, about as likely to be inaccurate as accurate, and none of the 12 models tested kept both false positives and false negatives below 10 percent. The post links to the dataset, whitepaper, and submission workflow for verified scoring.
• Build full-stack AWS applications in minutes with AI-powered scaffolding – Version 1.0 of the Nx Plugin for AWS is an open source toolkit of deterministic generators for APIs, websites, databases, and AI agents, plus the AWS infrastructure to run them. Each generator writes working, deployable code with security, observability, and type-safety already in place, so an AI assistant can assemble the foundation and spend its effort on your application logic. Bingo Industries used it to take a multi-agent operations chatbot from idea to production in less than 3 weeks. The plugin is open source on GitHub. Create a workspace with pnpm create @aws/nx-workspace and point your coding agent at the included MCP server.
• The oldest architecture in computing – On All Things Distributed, Werner Vogels starts from a question customers always ask “Will AI take my job?”, and lands on memory. After spending time with Kiro Crew, he traces a line from Jeff Hawkins’ A Thousand Brains to how Crew stores, consolidates, and forgets across markdown files, a vector database, and a key-value index. His conclusion: the brain is the oldest architecture in computing, and the people who think hardest about how it works will build the next tools. Now, go build.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development. Browse here for upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Micah

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: OpenAI GPT-6 Astra on Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Quick desktop GA, Kiro for students, and more (September 14, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today at the What’s Next with AWS, Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, Colleen Aubrey, SVP Amazon Applied AI Solutions, Julia White, CMO of AWS, and OpenAI leaders discussed how they and their customers are changing how businesses operate with agents.

Here’s our roundup of the biggest announcements from the event:

Amazon Quick is an AI assistant for work that connects to all of them, learns what matters to you, and takes action on your behalf. Starting today, you can use the new desktop app, sign up for Free and Plus pricing plans, generate visual assets in the chat, and easily connect Quick to even more apps.

• Quick’s new desktop app (Preview): You can create a personalized experience by staying connected to your local files, calendar, and communications without opening a browser.
• New Free and Plus pricing plans for Quick: You can sign up within minutes using your personal email address or existing Google, Apple, Github, or Amazon credentials—no AWS account required.
• Generate visual assets on the fly: Available today, Quick now lets you create polished documents, presentations, infographics, and images directly from the chat interface, no design skills or hours of formatting required.
• Easily connect Quick to even more apps: Also available today, Quick is expanding its native integrations to include Google Workspace, Zoom, Airtable, Dropbox, and Microsoft Teams.

To learn more, visit the About Amazon News post.

Amazon Connect is expanding from a single product into a set of four agentic AI solutions designed to work within your existing workflows: Amazon Connect Decisions (supply chains), Talent (hiring), Customer (customer experience), and Health (health care).

• Amazon Connect Decisions is a supply chain planning and intelligence solution that shifts teams from crisis management to proactive planning and decisioning. AI teammates, combining 30 years of Amazon operational science and 25+ specialized supply chain tools, adapt to your business, learn from your team, and continuously improve your operations.
• Amazon Connect Talent (Preview) is an agentic AI hiring solution built for talent acquisition leaders managing scaled hiring. It delivers AI-led interviews, science-backed assessments, and consistent evaluation, helping recruiters hire high quality candidates faster while providing applicants with a flexible interview experience that reduces human preconceptions.
• Amazon Connect Customer, previously known as Amazon Connect, delivers intelligent, personalized customer experiences across voice, chat, and digital channels. Amazon Connect Customer now offers new configuration capabilities that enable organizations to set up conversational AI in weeks, not months, and configure experiences without technical expertise.
• Amazon Connect Health delivers agentic patient verification, appointment management, patient insights, ambient documentation, and medical coding — giving patients faster access to care, clinicians more time for care, and staff capacity for specialized work.

To learn more, visit the About Amazon News post.

AWS and OpenAI expanded partnership

AWS and OpenAI are bringing the latest OpenAI models to Amazon Bedrock, launching Codex on Amazon Bedrock, and launching Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI (all in limited preview), giving enterprises the frontier intelligence they want on the infrastructure they trust.

• OpenAI models on Amazon Bedrock (Limited preview): The latest OpenAI models, including GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.4, will be available in preview on Amazon Bedrock. Use OpenAI’s frontier models through the same Bedrock APIs you already rely on, with unified security, governance, and cost controls. No additional infrastructure to configure, no new security model to learn.
• Codex on Amazon Bedrock (Limited preview): You can access the OpenAI coding agent within the AWS environments where they already operate at scale. You can authenticate using their AWS credentials, process inference through Amazon Bedrock infrastructure, and apply Codex usage toward their AWS cloud commitments. Codex on Bedrock is available through the Bedrock API, starting with the Codex CLI, the Codex desktop app, and Visual Studio Code extension.
• Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI (Limited preview): Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents combines frontier AI models with trusted AWS infrastructure, enabling customers to quickly and easily build production-ready OpenAI-powered agents in the cloud. It is built with the OpenAI harness, which is engineered to unlock the full potential of OpenAI frontier models, delivering faster execution, sharper reasoning, and reliable steering of long-running tasks.

To learn more, visit the AWS What’s New post and About Amazon News post.

The post Top announcements of the What’s Next with AWS, 2026 appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

At the end of 2025 I was happy to take a long break to enjoy the incredible summers that the southern hemisphere provides. I’m back and writing my first post in 2026 which also happens to be my last post for the AWS News Blog (more on this later).

The AWS community is starting the year strong with various AWS re:invent re:Caps being hosted around the globe, with some communities already hosting their AWS Community Day events, the AWS Community Day Tel Aviv 2026 was hosted last week.

Last week’s launches

Here are last week’s launches that caught my attention:

• Kiro CLI latest features – Kiro CLI now has granular controls for web fetch URLs, keyboard shortcuts for your custom agents, enhanced diff views, and much more. With these enhancements, you can now use allowlists or blocklists to restrict which URLs the agent can access, ensure a frictionless experience when working with multiple specialized agents in a single session, to name a few.
• AWS European Sovereign Cloud – Following an announcement in 2023 of plans to build a new, independent cloud infrastructure, last week we announced the general availability of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud to all customers. The cloud is ready to meet the most stringent sovereignty requirements of European customers with a comprehensive set of AWS services.
• Amazon EC2 X8i instances – Previously launched in preview at AWS re:Invent 2025, last week we announced the general availability of new memory-optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) X8i instances. These instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors with a sustained all-core turbo frequency of 3.9 GHz, available only on AWS. These SAP certified instances deliver the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud.

Additional updates

These projects, blog posts, and news articles also caught my attention:

• 5 core features in Amazon Quick Suite – AWS VP Agentic AI Swami Sivasubramanian talks about how he uses Amazon Quick Suite for just about everything. In October 2025 we announced Amazon Quick Suite, a new agentic teammate that quickly answers your questions at work and turns insights into actions for you. Amazon Quick Suite has become one of my favorite productivity tools, helping me with my research on various topics in addition to providing me with multiple perspectives on a topic.
• Deploy AI agents on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore using GitHub Actions – Last year we announced Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a flexible service that helps you seamlessly create and manage AI agents across different frameworks and models, whether hosted on Amazon Bedrock or other environments. Learn how to use a GitHub Actions workflow to automate the deployment of AI agents on AgentCore Runtime. This approach delivers a scalable solution with enterprise-level security controls, providing complete continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) automation.

Upcoming AWS events

Join us January 28 or 29 (depending on your time zone) for Best of AWS re:Invent, a free virtual event where we bring you the most impactful announcements and top sessions from AWS re:Invent. Jeff Barr, AWS VP and Chief Evangelist, will share his highlights during the opening session.

There is still time until January 21 to compete for $250,000 in prizes and AWS credits in the Global 10,000 AIdeas Competition (yes, the second letter is an I as in Idea, not an L as in like). No code required yet: simply submit your idea, and if you’re selected as a semifinalist, you’ll build your app using Kiro within AWS Free Tier limits. Beyond the cash prizes and potential featured placement at AWS re:Invent 2026, you’ll gain hands-on experience with next-generation AI tools and connect with innovators globally.

Earlier this month, the 2026 application for the Community Builders program launched. The application is open until January 21st, midnight PST so here’s your last chance to ensure that you don’t miss out.

If you’re interested in these opportunities, join the AWS Builder Center to learn with builders in the AWS community.

With that, I close one of my most meaningful chapters here at AWS. It’s been an absolute pleasure to write for you and I thank you for taking the time to read the work that my team and I pour our absolute hearts into. I’ve grown from the close collaborations with the launch teams and the feedback from all of you. The Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) community has grown significantly, and I want to dedicate more time focused on this community, I’m still at AWS and I look forward to meeting at an event near you!

Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

– Veliswa Boya

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Kiro CLI latest features, AWS European Sovereign Cloud, EC2 X8i instances, and more (January 19, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.