AWS freezes Bedrock Agents: no new customers, model catalog frozen
Amazon's flagship 2023 agent product is maintenance-only from July 30: existing agents run on, new builds move to AgentCore, plus DeepSeek's cheap refresh.
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Bedrock Agents is now 'Classic' — and frozen
Amazon renamed the agent framework it launched in November 2023 to Bedrock Agents Classic and put it in maintenance mode as of July 30. No new features land, and the model catalog is frozen — any model AWS ships after that date shows up only in AgentCore, never in Classic.
New accounts are locked out
Access is now allowlist-only: unless your account called CreateAgent or InvokeInlineAgent in the last 12 months, new agent creation returns a 403 AccessDeniedException reading 'Bedrock Agents is in Maintenance Mode.' If you were about to prototype an agent on it, that door is shut — start on AgentCore instead.
Your running agents are safe — no deadline
Nothing breaks today. Existing agents keep running and every API — InvokeAgent, UpdateAgent, knowledge-base and action-group calls — stays live, with no end-of-life date and no forced migration deadline. You're simply on a platform that will never get another new model.
The exit ramp is AgentCore
AWS points you at AgentCore Harness, a config-first experience close to Classic — declare model, tools and instructions, and it handles compute, memory, identity and observability — or code-defined agents on AgentCore Runtime for custom orchestration. AWS says a straightforward agent moves in hours.
Elsewhere: DeepSeek's V4 Flash gets a cheap refresh
DeepSeek pushed a refreshed V4-Flash-0731 snapshot to OpenRouter on Aug 1 — a 284B/13B MoE with a 1M-token context under MIT, at $0.14 in / $0.28 out. It's a cheap, self-hostable open-weights option if you'd rather own your agent stack than rent one.