Pick it if your agents must live inside an AWS account with per-agent IAM identities and CloudTrail logs, and you want OpenAI's Codex agent loop driving the work. It is a preview with text-only input and no subagents, so treat it as a pilot. The AgentCore example caps idle time and lifetime at 8 hours.
Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI, is an AWS public preview that runs stateful agents on OpenAI models through bedrock-mantle endpoints in 3 US Regions. A session holds the model, instructions, tools and IAM role, while commands execute on compute you supply: your own host or Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the pricing plans for Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents in 2026?
AWS's preview documentation lists no separate per-agent fee. You pay for model inference on Amazon Bedrock plus the AWS resources your application runs, and Amazon says OpenAI models on Bedrock are priced at OpenAI first-party rates with a 90% cached-input discount. The AgentCore example adds storage and a NAT gateway that can bill while idle, so delete the stack after testing.
Is Bedrock Managed Agents available in every AWS Region?
No. The preview runs on bedrock-mantle endpoints in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon) and US East (Ohio) only. Cross-Region inference profiles are not supported in this workflow, and the models you can use depend on your Region and account.
What are the best alternatives to Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents?
For Anthropic models under AWS controls, use Claude in Amazon Bedrock. For a Google Cloud stack, Google Vertex AI covers the same buyer. If you would rather call OpenAI directly, the OpenAI Agents API skips the AWS wrapper but also the IAM and CloudTrail integration.
Bedrock Managed Agents or AgentCore: which should you pick?
They stack rather than compete. AgentCore is the open platform for agents on any model and framework, and it supplies the default compute for managed agents. Choose managed agents when you want OpenAI's agent loop handling the session, and plain AgentCore when you bring your own model or framework.
What does it take to start using Bedrock Managed Agents?
You need an AWS account in a supported Region, a session role that trusts bedrock-mantle.amazonaws.com, and iam:PassRole on that role for the caller. Requests are signed with SigV4 and no OpenAI API key is required. AWS supplies an example bundle with a self-hosted path and an AgentCore CDK path for the first run.
Top Alternatives
- Claude in Amazon Bedrock: Pick Claude in Amazon Bedrock if you want Anthropic models under the same AWS controls, with 27 Regions listed on its record.
- Google Vertex AI: Pick Google Vertex AI if your data and identity already sit on Google Cloud rather than AWS.
- Baseten: Pick Baseten if you want to serve your own or open models instead of a managed OpenAI agent runtime.