AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Sonnet 4.6 in Amazon Bedrock, Kiro in GovCloud Regions, new Agent Plugins, and more (February 23, 2026)

This AWS Weekly Roundup covers major AWS launches for the week of February 23, 2026, with a strong focus on AI tools, compute instances, and security improvements.

• •Claude Sonnet 4.6 is now available in Amazon Bedrock, offering near Opus 4.6 intelligence at lower cost for high-volume coding and knowledge work
• •Kiro, AWS's agentic AI development tool, is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions for developers in regulated environments
• •New open-source Agent Plugins for AWS extend coding agents with skills to deploy applications, generate architecture recommendations, cost estimates, and infrastructure-as-code
• •Amazon EC2 Hpc8a instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors deliver up to 40% higher performance with 300 Gbps EFA networking for HPC workloads
• •Amazon Aurora now applies server-side encryption by default to all new database clusters using AWS-owned keys at no additional cost or performance impact
• •AWS DevOps Agent has handled thousands of escalations internally at A