What's New with AWS — May 2026: The Month in Review
A themed roundup of every headline launch AWS shipped in May 2026 — the What's Next with AWS event, agents that can pay for things, the Agent Toolkit and AWS MCP Server, Claude Platform on AWS reaching GA, and a run of compute, database, and security releases. Every item links back to the original announcement.
May 2026 kept the agentic-AI momentum going and then some. The month opened with the What's Next with AWS event — a packed slate spanning Amazon Quick, a reimagined Amazon Connect, and a deeper OpenAI partnership on Bedrock — and rolled on through a genuine first for the platform: agents that can pay for things, via Amazon Bedrock AgentCore payments. Along the way, AWS shipped the Agent Toolkit and a GA AWS MCP Server, brought Claude Platform on AWS to general availability, and celebrated AWS Transform's first birthday.
Below is a roundup of the month's most notable launches, grouped by theme. Every item links straight to its original announcement.
The Headline: What's Next with AWS
On April 28, AWS CEO Matt Garman, SVP Colleen Aubrey, CMO Julia White, and OpenAI leaders took the stage to show how customers are reshaping their businesses with agents. The announcements landed at the start of May.
Amazon Quick — desktop app, new plans, and visual generation amazon-quick
Quick, the AI assistant for work, added a desktop app (Preview) that stays connected to your local files, calendar, and communications. It can now generate polished documents, presentations, infographics, and images from chat, with new integrations (Google Workspace, Zoom, Airtable, Dropbox, Microsoft Teams) and a natural-language "Build custom apps" capability.
Amazon Connect becomes four agentic AI solutions connect
Connect expanded from one product into four: Decisions (supply-chain planning built on 30 years of Amazon operational science), Talent (agentic hiring, Preview), Customer (the former Connect, now standing up conversational AI in weeks), and Health (agentic patient verification, documentation, and coding).
AWS and OpenAI expand across Amazon Bedrock bedrock
In limited preview: the latest OpenAI models (GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.4) on the Bedrock APIs you already use, Codex on Amazon Bedrock (authenticating with AWS credentials and applying usage to your AWS commitments), and Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI for production OpenAI-powered agents built with the OpenAI harness.
Agents That Transact
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore payments (preview) agentcore
The first managed payment capabilities that let AI agents autonomously access and pay for APIs, MCP servers, web content, and other agents. Built with Coinbase and Stripe, you connect a Coinbase CDP or Stripe Privy wallet, set session-level spending limits, and the agent transacts during execution — think a research agent paying for real-time data, or a coding agent calling paid APIs mid-task.
Agent Tooling for AWS
Agent Toolkit for AWS dev-tools
A production-ready, no-cost suite of tools and guidance that helps AI coding agents build on AWS with fewer errors, lower token costs, and enterprise-grade security controls. It's the successor to the MCP servers, plugins, and skills on AWS Labs.
AWS MCP Server (GA) mcp
A managed remote Model Context Protocol server giving AI agents and coding assistants secure, authenticated access to all AWS services through a small, fixed set of tools — part of the Agent Toolkit for AWS.
Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents (Preview) workspaces
Give AI agents their own managed WorkSpaces desktop to securely access and operate desktop applications — automating everyday workflows at scale while keeping enterprise governance and compliance.
Bedrock AgentCore optimization (preview) agentcore
Closes the observe-evaluate-improve loop: recommendations analyze production traces to propose better system prompts and tool descriptions, validated with batch evaluations or A/B tests against live traffic — every change requires your approval.
Anthropic on AWS
Claude Platform on AWS (GA) claude
Direct access to Anthropic's native Claude Platform — APIs, console, and early-access beta features — through your existing AWS account, with no separate accounts or billing to manage. Operated by Anthropic; customer data is processed outside the AWS security boundary.
AWS Transform turns one — now in Kiro, Claude, Cursor & Codex transform
In 12 months, customers migrated hundreds of thousands of servers, saved 1.6M+ hours, and processed 4.5B+ lines of code with AWS Transform. For its anniversary, Transform agents are now available across Kiro, Claude, Cursor, and Codex, plus a Kiro power for building customized transformation agents.
Amazon Bedrock — Advanced Prompt Optimization bedrock
Optimize prompts for any Bedrock model and compare original vs. optimized prompts across up to five models at once — handy when migrating to a new model or squeezing more out of your current one.
AWS Security Agent — full-repository code scanning (preview) security
Deep, context-aware security analysis of your entire codebase that generates code remediation tied to the exact file and line — available at no additional charge to existing Security Agent customers during preview.
Compute & Networking
Amazon EC2 M3 Ultra Mac instances (GA) ec2-mac
Built on Apple M3 Ultra Mac Studio (28-core CPU, 60-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, 256GB unified memory). Versus M4 Max Mac instances: 2× the unified memory, 1.75× CPU cores, 1.5× GPU cores, and 2× Neural Engine cores — more parallel Xcode simulators and faster on-device ML.
Amazon EC2 M8in / M8ib and R8in / R8ib (GA) ec2
General-purpose and memory-optimized instances on custom 6th-gen Intel Xeon Scalable and 6th-gen Nitro — up to 43% higher performance, with 600 Gbps networking (M8in/R8in) or up to 300 Gbps EBS bandwidth (M8ib/R8ib). R-family suits large databases and SAP HANA.
Amazon EC2 C8ine and M8ine (GA) ec2
Network-optimized instances with up to 2.5× higher packet performance per vCPU and 2× higher throughput through internet gateways vs. C6in/M6in — built for virtual firewalls, load balancers, and 5G UPF workloads.
AWS Lambda adds Ruby 4.0 lambda
The latest Ruby LTS as a managed runtime and container base image, with advanced logging controls (JSON structured logs, configurable levels, target log group) across all Regions including China and GovCloud (US).
AWS Interconnect — multicloud with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (preview) networking
OCI becomes the latest cloud to adopt the open Interconnect spec, joining Google Cloud (GA) and Azure (later in 2026) for consistent private multicloud connectivity.
AWS Local Zones now open in Istanbul, Türkiye infrastructure
A new Local Zone brings AWS compute, storage, and networking to one of Europe's largest metros — single-digit millisecond latency and in-country data residency for finance, government, telecom, and healthcare.
Databases & Analytics
Amazon Redshift RG instances on AWS Graviton redshift
Up to 2.4× faster than previous-gen RA3 at 30% lower price per vCPU, with a custom vectorized data-lake query engine that processes Apache Iceberg and Parquet directly on cluster nodes.
ExtendDB — open-source DynamoDB-compatible adapter dynamodb
Use the DynamoDB API and data model on top of alternative backend storage — great for local development and testing without a live AWS connection, and for teams wanting DynamoDB semantics with more control over storage.
Valkey 9.0 in Amazon ElastiCache elasticache
Valkey turned two — past 100M Docker pulls (17× YoY) and 225+ contributors — and its latest 9.0 release is now available in ElastiCache.
Amazon SageMaker AI — OpenAI-compatible inference APIs sagemaker
Call SageMaker AI inference endpoints using OpenAI-compatible APIs, so teams that prototyped on OpenAI can migrate with no SDK changes — point existing code at your SageMaker endpoint.
Security & Operations
AWS Security Hub Extended — 21 partner solutions security-hub
Now integrates 21 curated partner security solutions across 9 categories (endpoint protection, CSPM, threat intelligence, and more), delivering consolidated, prioritized findings without custom integrations.
Secrets Manager Agent — pre-fetch and IAM role assumption secrets-manager
Preload secrets at startup and assume IAM roles to retrieve them, eliminating cold-start latency for latency-sensitive apps and making the agent easier to share across workloads with different permission boundaries.
AWS SAM CLI — CloudFormation Language Extensions sam
Use transforms, dynamic references, and other CloudFormation language features locally, closing a long-standing gap between local testing and production for serverless development.
Developer Experience & Community
Kiro Web kiro
Kiro's spec-driven development, AI chat, and agent capabilities now run in the browser — no desktop install needed for a quick review, prototyping from a new machine, or onboarding a team.
Updated retry behavior across AWS SDKs and tools sdk
Smarter backoff and better throttling handling improve resilience to transient errors out of the box — no configuration changes required.
AWS 10,000 AIdeas Competition — winners announced community
The 20 winners of the global challenge — AI apps built entirely with Kiro and the AWS Free Tier, from 115 countries — were named across Global, Regional, Innovation, and Creative categories.
The Month in a Paragraph
May 2026 was defined by AWS pushing agents from "build them" to "run them everywhere and let them act." It opened with the What's Next with AWS event — Amazon Quick's desktop app and visual generation, Amazon Connect splitting into four agentic solutions, and OpenAI's latest models, Codex, and managed agents arriving on Bedrock — and hit a genuine milestone with AgentCore payments, the first managed way for agents to autonomously pay for APIs and services (built with Coinbase and Stripe). The tooling layer filled in fast, too: the Agent Toolkit for AWS, a GA AWS MCP Server, WorkSpaces desktops for agents, and Claude Platform on AWS reaching general availability. Underneath the AI story, the fundamentals kept advancing — M3 Ultra Mac and 6th-gen Intel EC2 instances, Redshift on Graviton, open-source ExtendDB, a broader Security Hub Extended, and a new Istanbul Local Zone. If April was about agents going GA, May was about giving them a wallet, a desktop, and a place to live.