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Strands Agents (AWS Agent Core)

Integrate AgentSuite with Strands Agents, the open-source framework that powers AWS Agent Core, via the Virtue Gateway for Action Guard runtime enforcement, access control, MCP server scanning (where enabled), and session observability in the dashboard.

Installation​

pip install agentsuite-sdk[strands]

The [strands] extra installs the core strands-agents package needed for the adapter. It does not include an LLM provider — install the one you need separately:

pip install strands-agents[anthropic]   # Anthropic Claude (used in the demo)
pip install strands-agents[openai] # OpenAI

How It Works​

  • adapter.mcp_client() — returns a Strands MCPClient to pass into Agent(tools=[...]).
  • adapter.hook_provider() — returns a hook provider to pass into Agent(hooks=[...]) for automatic session tracking.

Quickstart​

from strands import Agent
from strands.models.anthropic import AnthropicModel
from agentsuite import GatewayClient

client = GatewayClient(url="...", api_key="sk-vai-...")
adapter = client.strands()

model = AnthropicModel(
client_args={"api_key": "sk-ant-..."},
model_id="claude-sonnet-4-20250514",
max_tokens=4096,
)
agent = Agent(
model=model,
system_prompt="You are a helpful assistant.",
tools=[adapter.mcp_client()],
hooks=[adapter.hook_provider()],
)

agent("What are my open tickets?")

Full runnable example: demo_strands.py

Example Output​

The agent responds to the query and prints the session ID:

Strands demo terminal output

View the full session trace in the VirtueAgent dashboard (Observability → Sessions):

VirtueAgent Sessions tab: session overview and execution trace

Environment Variables​

VariableDescription
VIRTUE_GATEWAY_URLGateway MCP endpoint URL
VIRTUE_API_KEYVirtueAI API key
ANTHROPIC_API_KEYAnthropic API key (only when using Anthropic models)
AGENT_MODELOptional; model name (demo default: claude-sonnet-4-20250514)