AI-generated editorial illustration; not a documentary photograph.
AWS has announced Strands Harness, a general-purpose AI agent built above its Strands Agents SDK. The company describes the project as open source and says developers can run its agent machinery locally or deploy it to different cloud providers. According to The New Stack's report dated September 21, 2026, the release was scheduled to go live later that Monday and was not yet available when the article was published.
A Preconfigured Agent Stack
Strands Harness packages file, shell and web tools with context management, memory, persistent sessions, prompt caching and delegation between agents. Developers can change the agent's instructions, tools, skills, storage and context behavior, connect MCP servers, and export configurations from its CLI as Python or TypeScript code.
Models Remain Swappable
Amazon Bedrock is the default model gateway, but AWS says it can be replaced with Anthropic, OpenAI or Google providers, or with a locally running model through Ollama. AWS also says no Harness feature requires Bedrock. Model choice still affects reasoning, tool use, behavior and cost, while the surrounding session, context and delegation components remain in place.
AWS Claims Lower Costs
In AWS's own testing across six benchmarks, Strands Harness reportedly delivered broadly comparable average accuracy to Claude Code and Codex at 45% lower average cost per task. The claimed advantage fell to 28% when DeepSeek Harness was included; AWS said DeepSeek Harness cost about 14% less than Strands Harness on matched runs. These are company-run results, not independent tests reported by the source.
Optional AWS Deployment Path
Although AWS presents Strands Harness as cloud-independent, the company also offers Amazon Bedrock AgentCore as an optional managed environment for hosting agents with identity controls, observability and infrastructure management. Strands Harness and AgentCore Harness were developed by the same team in separate codebases, giving AWS a commercial hosting path while leaving developers able to deploy elsewhere.
Source: AWS open-sources an AI agent it says is 45% cheaper than Claude Code and Codex
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