Amazon's new AI agent marketplace

Welcome back to Building AI Agents, your biweekly guide to everything new in the field of agentic AI!

Actually, I build agentic workflows so I can spend more time like this.

In today’s issue…

• AWS’s marketplace for agents is coming tomorrow

• Perplexity and OpenAI’s new agent-powered browsers

• 🚀 Building AI Agents’ origin story

• A roundup of the top agents and agent companies

• Agent builders’ 7 biggest problems

…and more

🔍 SPOTLIGHT

Amazon Web Services’ new marketplace for AI agents drops tomorrow—but whether it will be as universal as the Amazon we all know remains to be seen.

According to a report by TechCrunch, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing arm, is launching an agent marketplace in partnership with Anthropic at the AWS Summit on Tuesday. The platform will enable startup companies to sell agents to AWS’s enterprise customers, while allowing those enterprises to browse for agents that suit their needs.

The main consideration for agent builders here is that agents sold on the platform will (presumably) have to be built within AWS—possibly with AWS Bedrock Agents—so independent agent SaaS providers with their own custom software will need to build AWS-native versions of their products to sell on the marketplace. This is the case for other agent marketplaces already launched by major software companies, such as Google’s Agentspace, Microsoft’s Agent Store, and Salesforce’s AgentExchange.

The fact that AWS is partnering with Anthropic on the launch also raises questions of model lock-in—will agents listed on the marketplace be able to run on LLMs by other providers, like OpenAI or (Amazon’s cloud rival) Google? TechCrunch doesn’t make this clear, and since it’s an exclusive report, nobody else does either. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out.

My personal guess is that the provider list will be similar to the one for Bedrock Agents—Amazon, Anthropic, and a smattering of open-source and minor providers. The only other major company on the list is Meta, whose models are open-source, and which is not a direct competitor to Amazon or Anthropic. Conspicuously absent: OpenAI and Google. Anthropic’s best model offerings rival those of the other two, but if your agent setup truly can’t do without an OpenAI or Google model, you’ll probably be out of luck.

There are other platforms that bill themselves as AI agent marketplaces, such as Agentverse, AI Agents Directory, AI Agents Marketplace, and HubSpot CEO Dharmesh Shah’s Agent.ai, but these are all minor third-parties—with the possible exception of the last one, I wouldn’t exactly call them reputable. As far as a one-stop shop for anyone to build AI agents with any model for any platform goes, that role has yet to be filled.

The real Amazon of AI agents will probably have to wait.

🚀 BUILDING AI AGENTS’ ORIGIN STORY

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