From GeekWire, December 2:
LAS VEGAS — Amazon is pitching a future where AI works while humans sleep, announcing a collection of what it calls “frontier agents” capable of handling complex, multi-day projects without needing a human to be constantly involved.
The announcement Tuesday at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference is an attempt by the cloud giant to leapfrog Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, OpenAI, and others as the industry moves beyond interactive AI assistants toward fully autonomous digital workers.
The rollout features three specialized agents: A virtual developer for Amazon’s Kiro coding platform that navigates multiple code repositories to fix bugs; a security agent that actively tests applications for vulnerabilities; and a DevOps agent that responds to system outages.
Unlike standard AI chatbots that reset after each session, Amazon says the frontier agents have long-term memory and can work for hours or days to solve ambiguous problems.
“You could go to sleep and wake up in the morning, and it’s completed a bunch of tasks,” said Deepak Singh, AWS vice president of developer agents and experiences, in an interview.
Amazon is starting with the agents focused on software development, but Singh made it clear that it’s just the beginning of a larger long-term rollout of similar agents.
“The term is broad,” he said. “It can be applied in many, many domains.”
During the opening keynote Tuesday morning, AWS CEO Matt Garman said believes AI agents represent an “inflection point” in AI development, transforming AI from a “technical wonder” into something that delivers real business value.
In the future, Garman said, “there’s going to be millions of agents inside of every company across every imaginable field.”
To keep frontier agents from breaking critical systems, Amazon says humans remain the gatekeepers. The DevOps agent stops short of making fixes automatically, instead generating a detailed “mitigation plan” that an engineer approves. The Kiro developer agent submits its work as proposed pull requests, ensuring a human reviews the code before it’s merged.
Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and others are all moving in a similar direction. Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot is becoming a multi-agent system, Google is adding autonomous features to Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude Code is designed to handle extended coding tasks.
Amazon is announcing the frontier agents during the opening keynote by AWS CEO Matt Garman at re:Invent, its big annual conference. The DevOps and security agents are available in public preview starting Tuesday; the Kiro developer agent will roll out in the coming months.
Some of the other notable announcements at re:Invent today:
AI Factories: AWS will ship racks of its servers directly to customer data centers to run as a private “AI Factory,” in its words. This matters for governments and banks, for example, that want modern AI tools but are legally restricted from moving sensitive data off-premises....
....MUCH MORE
And more to come. Although Nvidia's stock saw today's gain cut from $4.50 to $1.50 on the chip news, an under-the-radar part of AMZN's chip development focus is interoperability with NVDA products including the hardware that ties it all together, NVLink.
