There’s a particular energy to mid-September in New York. Pumpkin spice lattes are flowing, temperatures are dropping, and it’s nearly sweater weather. The city is back at full speed, and so is the AWS launch calendar.
This week that energy showed up in a new frontier model on Amazon Bedrock, a desktop app for Amazon Quick, and a reminder that the developers seeing the biggest gains from AI agents aren’t just using better tools — they’re working differently. Let’s dive in. Headlines OpenAI GPT-6 Astra is now generally available on Amazon Bedrock – GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI’s latest and most capable model to date, and you can now run it on Amazon Bedrock.
It brings deeper reasoning and judgment, professional-quality writing and design, and advanced computer and browser use to demanding business workflows. The model supports a context window of up to 1 million input tokens, so you can send it large codebases, long contracts, or extensive document collections and ask it to reconcile competing inputs. You can call GPT-6 Astra through supported Amazon Bedrock APIs, or configure ChatGPT Work and Codex to use the model on Amazon Bedrock.
Alongside the launch, OpenAI is introducing new enterprise plugins for ChatGPT Work that extend Astra’s browser-use capabilities across common business applications. Established AWS controls help you secure workloads, govern access, and audit model invocation activity, and your inference data isn’t used for model training. Read more Last week’s launches Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention: Amazon Quick desktop app is now generally available on macOS and Windows – The Amazon Quick desktop app brings Amazon Quick to your computer, where it can work with local files and stay connected to your calendar, email, and business apps in the background.
Conversations, context, and agents stay synchronized across desktop and mobile, so work you start on one surface carries over to the other. With this release, Quick agents also keep running after you close your computer, which means you can start a long-running task before you leave the office, add input from the mobile app on the way home, and review the result when you get there.
Existing Quick users can download the desktop app , and the mobile app is available from the Apple App Store and Google Play. Read more AWS Lambda now supports a 90-minute function timeout on Lambda Managed Instances – You can now configure a function timeout of up to 90 minutes for asynchronous and event source mapping (ESM) invocations on Lambda Managed Instances, a 6x increase from the previous 15-minute limit.
That opens the door to data processing, media transcoding, financial calculations, AI inference, and batch jobs that need longer continuous execution, without splitting the work across multiple functions. Synchronous invocations keep the existing 15-minute maximum. The longer timeout also applies to steps inside Lambda durable functions, which can still run for up to a year when invoked asynchronously.
Read more Amazon EBS Volume Clones now copies volumes across accounts – Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Volume Clones can now copy a volume into another AWS account and re-encrypt it with an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key in the target account. If you keep production and development in separate accounts, you can share a volume with AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) and let the target account create a fresh copy in the same Availability Zone, for example, cloning a production database volume into an isolated development account.
Cross-account copy works for all volume types, including unencrypted volumes and volumes encrypted with customer managed keys. Read more Second-generation single-rack AWS Outposts is now generally available – The new single-rack AWS Outposts is a self-contained 42U rack that puts compute, storage, and networking into one compact unit for locations that need low latency, local data processing, or data residency, and don’t have room for a larger footprint.
A single rack delivers up to 2,688 vCPU and 100 TB of Amazon EBS storage, and supports the latest x86-powered Amazon EC2 instances, including general purpose (M7i, M8i), compute-optimized (C7i, C8i), memory-optimized (R7i, R8i), and Outposts accelerated networking instances. You get the same APIs, console, automation, governance, and security controls as multi-rack Outposts and AWS Regions.
Read more Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now available on v0 by Vercel – You can now describe a search or AI application in natural language inside v0 by Vercel and get a full-stack app backed by Amazon OpenSearch Serverless. v0 provisions a collection, indexes your data, and uses the OpenSearch Serverless endpoint for full-text search and vector search for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workloads, without leaving the v0 interface.
OpenSearch Serverless scales capacity up and down for you, so you can focus on the application instead of cluster management. You can provision under a new AWS account or link an existing one. Read more AWS Transform for .
NET modernization is now generally available via CLI – You can trigger an AWS-managed . NET modernization in AWS Transform custom with a single CLI command, then run it interactively or script it into an existing pipeline. The CLI sits alongside the existing AWS Transform for .
NET experiences in the web application, Visual Studio IDE, Kiro Power, and MCP agents. Use it to upgrade language versions, migrate frameworks, optimize performance, and analyze codebases with transformations you can run as-is or customize. The .
NET modernization transformation includes 50,000 free agent minutes per month. Read more For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.
Originally published at aws.amazon.com
