In the 16 months since Amazon Web Services (AWS) released Strands Agents, its open-source SDK for building AI agents, the project has steadily grown beyond that original toolkit. Since then, the company has added a labs program for experimenting with new approaches to agentic AI and released a harness for running agents, among other things. Its newest addition is a small model the Strands team built itself, designed to handle the quick, routine decisions agents make constantly so a larger and slower large language model doesn’t have to.
On Thursday, AWS released Strands Decider 2B. It’s a small decision model that puts the company in a corner of AI that has drawn a surge of interest among agent builders since TypeSafe AI introduced its Jev model last month. These decision models, sometimes called system one models, earned their appeal by doing…