AWS AgentCore now runs agents up to 14 days, up from 8 hours
Long-running runtimes, an agent-first browser, and spend-capped wallets all landed this week, as EU chatbot rules went live and OpenAI slowed Astra.
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14-day agent sessions, not 8 hours
AWS Bedrock AgentCore Runtime Instances hit GA on Aug 6, running agents on managed EC2 (GPU, memory-, or compute-optimized) for sessions up to 14 days — 42x the old 8-hour serverless cap. If long-running agents kept dying mid-task and you were bolting on checkpoint hacks, that ceiling is gone; you pay EC2 plus an orchestration fee, live in 8 regions.
An agent browser that's a one-param swap
Cloudflare's Kitesurf browser (Aug 6, free in beta) uses 3–7x less CPU and memory than a standard headless browser for screenshots and HTML extraction. Add browser=kitesurf to your existing Browser Run CDP or Quick Action calls — no rewrite — and run far more concurrent agent sessions on the same budget.
Give your agent a wallet with a hard cap
Also from Cloudflare (Aug 5): Virtual Wallets give each agent an API-key-scoped budget with spending caps, approved-merchant lists, and per-transaction limits, plus an x402 pay handle so it can buy API calls autonomously. Set a $10 ceiling and a prompt-injected agent can't run up your bill.
EU chatbot disclosure rules are now enforceable
The AI Act's Article 50 transparency duties took effect Aug 2: if your chatbot or AI-content tool reaches EU users, you must disclose it's AI and machine-readably label AI-generated media. Non-compliance can cost up to €15M or 3% of global turnover — worth an audit of your prod apps this week.
Elsewhere: OpenAI slows Astra over cyber risk
OpenAI said Aug 7 it can't rule out 'critical' cyber capabilities in its unreleased Astra model — the tier that can find zero-days in hardened systems without human help — so it's adding isolation, monitoring, and outside safety testing before release. No access for you yet, but expect tighter gating on frontier agentic-coding models.