Governing your agents, and governing agent transactions.
AWS Bedrock AgentCore governs the agents you operate. GateCore AI governs the transaction between two organizations that do not share a trust root. Most teams that need the second one are already using the first, and the two fit together.
Two different boundaries.
AgentCore is a strong agent platform: runtime, memory, identity, a tool gateway, pre-execution policy enforcement in Cedar, observability, and an agent payments service. Its boundary is your organization. Policy decisions are enforced at your gateway and logged to your CloudWatch, which is exactly right for controlling agents you run.
GateCore AI starts where two organizations meet. When a buyer's agent calls a provider's data or tool, both sides need the same answer to the same four questions, and neither side can be the sole keeper of the record. That is the problem we built for.
Same word, different job.
| The question | Governing your agents | Governing agent transactions |
|---|---|---|
| Who is being controlled | Agents your organization operates | A transaction between two organizations |
| Who holds the record | You, in your own observability stack | Both parties, each holding a copy of the same signed record |
| What a decision produces | An allow or deny, and a log entry | An allow or deny bound cryptographically to the price, the contract, and the outcome |
| Who can check it later | Anyone with access to your account | Either party, offline, without asking us or each other |
| What money means | Spend control: the agent's budget | A two-sided contract: the provider's price, the revenue share, the settlement |
| Where the provider stands | Outside the system, paid on delivery | Inside the system, with the same evidence the buyer has |
What AgentCore already does well.
We would rather be accurate than flattering to ourselves, so here is the part of the comparison that runs against us. AgentCore is not an observability product with governance bolted on.
- Policy in AgentCore is real pre-execution enforcement. It intercepts agent traffic at the gateway and evaluates every request before tool access, in Cedar or in natural language compiled to Cedar. Not a monitor. A gate.
- It reasons over sessions, not just single calls. Temporal policies can require that an approval happened earlier, block an action after N repeats, or hold a running total under a budget.
- AgentCore Payments exists. It orchestrates agent microtransactions over x402 and the Machine Payments Protocol, with wallet integration, per-session spend limits, and payment proof returned to the merchant.
- Identity, runtime isolation, and registry are mature. Existing identity providers work unchanged, and sessions run isolated.
If your question is "how do I keep my own agents inside their lane on AWS," that is a good answer and you should use it.
Proof that money moved is not proof that it should have.
A payment proof shows a transfer happened. A policy log shows a decision happened. They live in different systems, and neither is bound to the other. When a provider asks six months later why an agent was allowed to pull 40,000 records and what was owed for them, an answer assembled from two separate systems, both controlled by one party, is not evidence. It is an assertion.
GateCore AI issues one signed record that binds all of it together: the authorization decision and the policy version behind it, the contract it was made under, identified by hash, the price and the revenue split, and the execution outcome. Both parties receive a copy. Either party verifies it offline with a public key, and our verification page makes no network request at all.
What a governed transaction has to answer.
- Was this allowed? Under whose policy, at what version, and on what trust and provenance evidence.
- What did it cost? Priced from the contract before execution, not reconciled afterward.
- What actually happened? The execution outcome, including a denial, which is itself a signed record.
- Who is owed what? Settled on a hash-chained ledger where the splits must sum exactly to the amount reserved, or the capture is refused.
One record. Two holders. Verifiable by either, years later, without either party's cooperation.
These compose. They do not collide.
A common shape: AgentCore runs and governs your agents, and GateCore AI governs what those agents buy from outside your organization. Your internal policy stays yours. The cross-organization transaction gets a record both sides can hold.
If you are a data or tool provider, the direction reverses and matters more. Your clients' agents arrive from many stacks, and you need one governed, metered, evidenced lane that does not depend on which platform the buyer chose. That lane is what we are.
How to check this page.
Every statement about AWS Bedrock AgentCore on this page was taken from AWS's own product documentation and reflects what it described on 26 August 2026. AgentCore ships quickly, and we would rather you check than take our word for it. Read the AgentCore service overview, the Policy documentation, and the Payments documentation. Where this page says AWS's documentation does not describe something, that is a statement about the documentation on that date, not a claim about what AWS may build next.
Our side is checkable too. Take any GateCore AI receipt to the verification page, or read what the security page commits to.