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.”
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.
New AI Models: Amazon announced Nova 2, the next generation of the generative AI models it first unveiled here a year ago. They include a “Pro” model for complex reasoning, a “Sonic” model for natural voice conversations, and a new “Omni” model that processes text, audio, and video simultaneously.
Custom Models: Amazon introduced Nova Forge, a tool that lets companies build their own high-end AI models from scratch by combining their private data with Amazon’s own datasets. It’s designed for businesses that find standard models too generic but lack the resources to build one entirely alone.
Trainium: Amazon released its newest home-grown AI processor, Trainium 3, which it says is roughly 4x faster and 40% more efficient than the previous version. It’s central to Amazon’s strategy to lower the cost of training AI and provide a cheaper alternative to Nvidia GPUs. Executives also previewed Trainium 4, promising to double energy efficiency again.
Killing “Tech Debt”: AWS expanded its Transform service to rewrite and modernize code from basically any source, including proprietary languages. The tool uses AI agents to analyze and convert these custom legacy systems into modern languages, a process Amazon claims is up to five times faster than manual coding.
Stay tuned to GeekWire for more coverage from the event this week.
