AWS adds open source agent harness with 28% lower AI costs

AWS has added an efficiency-focused agent harness to its open source Strands SDK, claiming it runs general-purpose agents at 28% lower cost with Claude or GPT models at nearly equal benchmark scores. The harness is available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license for Python and TypeScript.

• Harness cuts agent running costs by 28% on Claude and GPT models
• Benchmark scores remain nearly equal
• Savings come from context management: tool results over ~1500 tokens are truncated
• Summarization triggers when the context window exceeds 85%