Amazon Bedrock

What it is

Amazon Bedrock is a managed service from Amazon Web Services (AWS). It gives customers API access to foundation models, which are large general-purpose AI models that can be adapted to many tasks. Bedrock is built to host models from several companies in one place, so a customer can use different models through the same service.^[1]

Origins

AWS announced Bedrock on 13 April 2023. The announcement was written by Swami Sivasubramanian.^[1] At that point the service offered models from AI21 Labs (its Jurassic-2 models), Anthropic (Claude), Stability AI (Stable Diffusion) and Amazon's own Titan models, in a limited preview.^[1]

Bedrock became generally available on 28 September 2023. At that point AWS added Cohere to its list of providers and promised Meta's Llama 2 within weeks. AWS said this made Bedrock the first fully managed service to offer Llama 2 through an API.^[2][3]

Main features

Bedrock is serverless, meaning customers do not manage the servers that run the models. Customers can fine-tune a model with as few as 20 labelled examples stored in Amazon S3, AWS's storage service. Their data stays private and encrypted within their own Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which is an isolated network area inside AWS.^[1][3]

Claude has been available on Bedrock since April 2023. By November 2024 AWS said tens of thousands of customers ran generative AI workloads on Anthropic models in AWS.^[4] A workload here means a running application or task.

Titan Embeddings, which turns text into numerical vectors used for search and matching, became generally available at the same time as the first generally available Titan model.^[2]

Amazon's Nova models, introduced on 3 December 2024, are available exclusively in Amazon Bedrock.^[6]

On 16 July 2025 AWS previewed Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. It is a set of services for deploying and operating AI agents with any framework or model. The components include Runtime, Memory, Identity, Gateway, Browser, Code Interpreter and Observability.^[5] AgentCore became generally available on 13 October 2025.^[5]

Place in the development

Bedrock is the platform through which Amazon offers its own models to outside customers, and it is also the platform where many third-party models are sold. That combination puts it at the centre of AWS's generative AI business. Its growth from a limited preview in 2023 to a general service with a dedicated agent platform in 2025 shows how the offering expanded over two years.^[1][2][5]