AgentCore course → Field cards → Release log

AgentCore release log

What shipped, when, whether it reached ca-central-1, and what it changed in this course. Newest first. Current to 2026-08-24.

This card exists because the course was wrong within five days of being written. AgentCore shipped three times in that window and one claim had to be retracted, so the log records corrections as well as releases — a changelog that only lists additions hides its own mistakes.

How to bring this up to date in five minutes

Do this before a meeting that matters, not after. Anything below older than about six weeks should be treated as suspect regardless of what this card says.

  1. Filter the AWS What's New feed for agentcore. Anything dated after the "current to" date above is new.
  2. Re-read the region matrix and diff the Canada (Central) column against the service map card. This is where most surprises live.
  3. Re-read cross-region inference. The global-routing source region list has already changed once.
  4. Check a status you are about to assert against two sources, normally the developer guide page title and the pricing page. That is what would have caught the Registry error below.
  5. Record what changed in VERIFIED-FACTS.md first, then update the lessons and cards from it.

Corrections

Claims this course asserted and later had to withdraw. Worth reading before you rely on any single entry below.

2026-08-24 Memory has four built-in strategies, not three The course taught semantic, user preference and summary. Episodic was missing, along with a third processing step, Reflection, which generates insights across episodes. Cause — the docs restructured and the strategy detail moved. The old long-term-memory.html citation now lands on a generic overview, so the gap went unnoticed.
2026-08-24 Web Search is not available in Canada Three regions only: us-east-1, eu-west-1, ap-northeast-1. It never was in ca-central-1. Both earlier passes recommended it as a research agent's dominant cost meter without saying so. Cause — not a change, an omission. Web Search had no row in the region matrix until this pass, so it was never diffed against the Canada column.
2026-08-10 Agent Registry is not GA The course had recorded GA on 6 Aug 2026. That date is a namespace migration, not a GA announcement. The developer guide still carries the preview label and the pricing page still says there is no charge during preview. Cause — reading "moves to the generally available agent-registry namespace" as a GA date. Two sources would have caught it.
2026-08-10 Policy global routing is two source regions, not four On 5 Aug AWS documented four source regions using global cross-region inference for Policy, including Malaysia and Thailand. By 10 Aug only Canada (Central) and São Paulo remained. Effect — the Canada finding got sharper, not weaker. Being one of two is a stronger statement than one of four.

Releases

2026-08-20 Memory accepts non-conversational JSON payloadsCanada CreateEvent takes a JSON payload up to 100 KB, so behavioural events, activity logs and system events feed the extraction pipeline directly instead of being reshaped into synthetic conversation. Works across all four strategies. Course — added to Lesson 4. Removes a workaround teams used to fake a transcript.
2026-08-19 Web Search adds domain and date filteringNot Canada Per-request include and exclude domain lists, up to 100 domains each, plus published-date from and to bounds and gateway-level allowlists. Expanded to eu-west-1 and ap-northeast-1, joining us-east-1. Course — prompted the correction above. Useful for regulated customers who need to constrain sources, if they can accept an out-of-region call.
2026-08-18 Payments GANot Canada Was preview. GA adds Quick Create for Coinbase credential provisioning in the console, a curated Coinbase Bazar MCP server of pay-per-use x402 endpoints via Gateway, Machine Payment Protocol support, and the x402 "upto" scheme for pay-per-inference and dynamic pricing. Footprint grew from four regions to twelve, still excluding Canada. Course — status changed in Lesson 6, the service map, the Canada card, the whiteboard card and one quiz whose correct answer this invalidated.
2026-08-07 Memory, policy, harness in GovCloud (US-West) Announced 7 Aug, but the region matrix contradicted it for about a fortnight. Resolved: by 24 Aug the matrix agrees, and harness, Memory, Policy and Evaluations are all in GovCloud. Optimization is not. Course — the "unsettled, promise only the matrix" caveat has been removed. When an announcement and the matrix disagree, the matrix is the one that eventually wins.
2026-08-06 Runtime Instances GANot Canada Agents on AWS-managed EC2 in the customer's account, via a capacity provider. GPU-accelerated, memory- and compute-optimised families. Sessions to 14 days against the microVM runtime's 8 hours. Bills EC2 On-Demand plus a management fee from boot, so idle time is charged. Course — added a gate to Lesson 2's decision tree. A GPU requirement no longer means leaving AgentCore, except in Canada, where it still does.
2026-08-06 Temporal policies and rate limiting Stateful authorization that evaluates a request against the agent's prior actions in a session: workflow sequencing, requiring an argument to match a prior call's output, human approval before privileged actions, data freshness. Rate limiting caps requests, inference tokens and concurrent connections per user or group. Course — strengthened the prompt-injection answer in Lesson 3 and on the objections card. Regions unstated, so described as announced rather than available.
2026-06-17 harness GACanada Declare an agent as configuration and run it without orchestration code. Exports to Strands code with one CLI command. Course — gate 1 of the compute decision, and the lock-in answer.
2026-06-17 Guardrails within Policy GANot Canada Content screening at the gateway perimeter. Five regions only. Course — the caveat that separates Policy from Guardrails-in-Policy on every Canada page.
2026-05 Optimization PreviewCanada Trace-driven prompt and tool-description improvement. No announced GA date. Course — the third step of the quality loop.
2026-04 Payments over x402 PreviewNot Canada HTTP 402 handling, wallet auth, stablecoin payment and proof delivery inside the reasoning loop, with spending limits enforced at the infrastructure layer. Course — pattern C on the whiteboard card.
2026-04 AgentCore CLI GA Infrastructure-as-code deployment. No additional charge. Course — mentioned, not taught.
2026-04 AWS Agent Registry PreviewNot Canada Org-wide catalogue of agents, MCP servers, tools and skills, with an approval workflow and hybrid search. Still preview; see the correction above and the deadline below. Course — Lesson 6, and the answer to agent sprawl.
2026-03-31 Evaluations GACanada Automated quality scoring on sessions and traces. Uses cross-region inference, avoidable with custom evaluators. Course — the measurement half of the quality loop.
2026-03 Runtime session storage Preview Externalises the session filesystem so an agent can suspend and resume. No longer a row in the region matrix, so Canada availability is unconfirmed. Pricing will change before GA. Course — mentioned as preview in Lesson 2, dropped from the cards while unconfirmed.
~2025-12 Policy GACanada Deterministic authorization on every tool call, authored in Cedar and evaluated at the gateway. Global cross-region inference from Canada with no opt-out. Course — Lesson 3, and the single most consequential Canada finding in the course.
2025-10 AgentCore GACanada Runtime microVMs, Memory, Gateway, Identity, Browser, Code Interpreter and Observability. All services gained VPC, PrivateLink, CloudFormation and resource tagging at GA. Course — the foundation the whole course assumes.

Releases before August 2026 are omitted from the printed card and remain on the web version. Foundational GA dates are on the service map card.

Watch list

Dates and unknowns that will bite rather than changes that already landed.

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