Amazon Bedrock AgentCore enables custom authentication and bounded payments

New technical implementations for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore allow for enhanced authentication and payment capabilities for AI agents.

To support legacy enterprise environments, organizations can use a request Lambda interceptor within the AgentCore Gateway. This allows agents to utilize HTTP Basic Authentication by retrieving system credentials from AWS Secrets Manager to construct headers. While this provides a bridge for legacy workloads, AWS notes that Basic Auth is an antiquated technology and recommends modernizing to OAuth 2.0, SAML, or IAM to mitigate security risks like prompt injection.

Additionally, the aws-agents-pay plugin enables OpenClaw agents to perform bounded HTTP 402 payments through AWS. This system allows a trusted operator to configure specific parameters, including per-payment ceilings and cumulative budgets, to ensure agents cannot expand their own spending limits. The plugin validates payment challenges and recipient details before requesting signed authorization from AgentCore. To maintain security, paid responses are limited in size and marked as untrusted to prevent potential prompt-injection instructions contained within merchant or API content.