AgentCore Runtime

AgentCore Runtime is an AWS service that runs AI agents in the cloud. Instead of a company buying and managing its own servers, it's like a hotel that automatically adds more rooms whenever they're needed. Even if requests suddenly spike, there's no need to pre-provision servers (rooms) — it scales up on its own.

Say a company's internal system fires off thousands of queries a day. You can build a program (an agent) to handle them, but where and how to keep that program running continuously is a separate problem. AgentCore Runtime launches this program with a single call and automatically adjusts capacity behind the scenes as traffic rises and falls.

In practice, internal company systems often aren't directly connected to the cloud. In that case, the setup splits the work: an intermediary program on the company side gathers and forwards requests, while AgentCore Runtime on the cloud side actually runs the agent.

Articles describe it as running agents serverlessly, automatically handling traffic spikes without server provisioning. A common misunderstanding here is thinking AgentCore Runtime itself is a smart AI model. In reality, the actual decision-making is done by Anthropic's model — AgentCore Runtime is closer to a stage that reliably runs the program containing that model in the cloud.