AWS just froze Bedrock Agents Classic. Your model catalog is dead. Migrate now or get locked out.

AWS froze Bedrock Agents Classic to new customers on July 30.

Your model catalog is permanently locked.

Any model AWS releases after July 30 only exists on AgentCore. If you're running agents on Classic, you're stuck on today's models forever.

This isn't a soft deprecation. AWS also killed roughly 20 other services in the same window — Kendra, Q Business, all moved to maintenance mode simultaneously. Read together, it's a consolidation: AWS is shutting down every overlapping agent platform and funneling you to AgentCore whether you planned for it or not.

Here's what breaks:

New AWS accounts get a 403 on CreateAgent. No exceptions. No appeal process.

Existing agents keep running, but the model catalog is frozen. Want to upgrade to the next frontier model? Not on Classic.

August 6 — four days from now — Agent Registry goes GA under a completely new namespace. Every endpoint, IAM policy, SDK client, and CLI script that references bedrock-agentcore breaks if you don't migrate by September 17.

This is the pattern every enterprise AI team needs to internalize: your cloud vendor's agent platform has a two-year shelf life. Bedrock Agents shipped November 2023. Dead to new customers July 2026. That's the lifecycle.

Audit every agent workload on Bedrock today. If you're on Classic, start the AgentCore migration now — not because Classic is shutting down, but because the frozen model catalog means you're already falling behind every competitor who isn't.

SOURCE: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/agents-classic-maintenance-mode.html
VERIFIED: AWS official documentation, byteiota.com analysis
SIGNAL: AWS is consolidating its AI agent stack mid-flight. Enterprises locked into Classic lose access to every future model release. The migration deadline is September 17.