AWS Summit New York 2026 opens today at the Javits Center with confirmed product announcements for Kiro, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, and Amazon Quick. The summit keynote, led by Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Agentic AI at AWS, and Chet Kapoor, Vice President of Security Services and Observability, runs from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM ET and is available globally via livestream. AWS enters this summit at a $142 billion annualized run rate, with agentic AI serving as the organizing theme for virtually every major service announcement in 2026. The summit features 200+ sessions organized across five thematic tracks and includes hands-on builder sessions prioritizing practical learning over passive presentations.
Kiro launched internationally on May 7, 2026, as a ground-up replacement for Amazon Q Developer, marking a fundamental shift from chat-first to spec-driven development methodology. Unlike Q Developer's reactive chat approach, Kiro generates a specification before writing code using EARS formal notation to produce requirements.md, design.md, and tasks.md documents that guide the agent through property-verified implementation. The platform addresses the central engineering problem that enterprise AI adoption through 2025 faced: getting agents into production reliably, securely, and with meaningful observability. New signups to Q Developer were blocked on May 15, with full end-of-support for IDE plugins set for April 30, 2027, making Kiro's migration timeline critical for existing users.
AgentCore is AWS's infrastructure stack for taking AI agents from prototype into production, providing a comprehensive framework-agnostic solution. The platform offers 8-hour session windows and session isolation, a memory layer for persistent context, and a Cedar-powered authorization gateway that enforces default-deny policies on all tool invocations. AgentCore Gateway sits between the agent and every external tool, automatically translating REST APIs into MCP-compatible tools with no custom integration code required. The security architecture uses Cedar, an open-source policy language developed by AWS, which governs authorization through mathematically verifiable policies rather than simple trust-based systems. AgentCore Runtime provides the execution environment, while AgentCore Memory manages short-term conversation context and long-term knowledge that persists across sessions.
Amazon Quick launched on April 28, 2026, as a significant reframe of the Amazon Q Business product line, offering proactive, module-based architecture including Spaces (collaborative workspaces), Chat Agents (autonomous agents executing cross-app workflows), Flows (natural-language automation builders), Research (deep search across internal and external data), and Automations (drag-and-drop task automation). The analytics infrastructure underneath Quick uses the SPICE engine (Super-fast Parallel In-memory Calculation Engine), which received a major capacity update in January 2026, now supporting up to 2TB of data per dataset while maintaining strong query performance through in-memory architecture. Quick connects to organizational data across AWS services, third-party SaaS platforms via MCP, and more than 1,000 integrations.
AWS has introduced AI traffic monetization capabilities to AWS WAF Bot Control, allowing publishers to charge AI bots for web content access at the network edge. The service supports per-request charges by content path, bot category, or verification tier without changing origin infrastructure or adding application code. AWS WAF Bot Control classifies more than 650 AI bots and agent types, including GPTBot, Claude-Web, and Perplexity-Bot, grouping them into verified and unverified tiers. When an AI bot or agent requests a protected resource like an article, a data feed, or a licensed archive, AWS WAF returns a machine-readable HTTP 402 Payment Required response using the x402 open protocol for machine-to-machine payments. The response contains your prices to access the content, accepted payment methods, and license terms. AI traffic monetization is available to AWS WAF customers at no additional charge, with integration provided by Coinbase's x402 Facilitator, and Stripe support coming soon.
The launch extends a buildout that has moved quickly over the past several months, with previous developments including Stripe's x402 integration for billing AI agents in USDC in February, the protocol's v2 multi-chain upgrade in December, and the launch of Agentic.Market in April. Coinbase also rolled out dedicated agent accounts under its "Coinbase for Agents" product earlier this month, with more than 10,000 merchants already integrated into the protocol. AI bot traffic now accounts for more than half of web traffic for many content providers, while AI-specific crawlers have risen by more than 300% year-on-year. AWS framed the move as part of a broader push towards common payment standards for automated agents, with Stripe providing payment infrastructure through an upcoming integration that would let content owners receive funds directly into bank accounts. The summit represents AWS's most product-dense sprint in recent memory, following the international launch of Kiro, the introduction of Amazon Quick, and the comprehensive infrastructure stack for running AI agents in enterprise production.
