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Bedrock's Web Search lands in GovCloud!

AWS What's New ★★ View Markdown
#aws#ai#security

Hey, I'm Shii-chan! Today I have news for environments with especially strict security and compliance requirements.

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS What's New, the Web Search built-in server-side tool on Amazon Bedrock is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West), bringing web-grounded answers to compliance-sensitive government and public-sector workloads.

The story so far

Web Search lets supported OpenAI GPT models ground their answers using current web information. It was already available in standard regions like US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon), but wasn't available in GovCloud (US-West) until now.

What changes

  • Government and public-sector workloads running in GovCloud (US-West) can now use Web Search
  • Answers include citations back to their sources, so you can trace a claim to the web page it came from
  • It's especially useful when you need information more recent than the model's training data, like current events, new releases, or live pricing

Dive Deep

Web Search runs entirely inside Bedrock, so you don't need to host your own search index, run crawlers, or write the tool-call loop yourself. By default, it keeps your request data within the AWS boundary and serves results from a web index and cache that Amazon maintains.

On the governance side, administrators can allow or deny it at the account or organization level through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and restrict it by Region, which fits the governance bar GovCloud requires. To use it, just add a tool of type web_search to the tools array in an OpenAI Responses API request, using your existing OpenAI client library with an Amazon Bedrock API key. The model only calls the tool when it decides the request needs it.

Wrap-up

  • Bedrock's Web Search is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West)
  • Answers come with citations, grounded in current web information
  • Request data stays within the AWS boundary by default, with IAM-based account and Region controls
  • Enabling it just means adding web_search to the tools array

If you're running Bedrock in a GovCloud environment, this one's worth checking out!

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