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Use an AgentCore gateway - Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

Use an AgentCore gateway

After setting up your gateway with targets , you can configure your application or agent to use the gateway through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) . The MCP provides a standardized way for agents to discover and invoke tools.

Note

AgentCore Gateway supports the following MCP versions: 2026-07-28, 2025-11-25, 2025-06-18, and 2025-03-26.

Version 2026-07-28 is a stateless protocol revision. Clients do not perform an initialize handshake. Each request carries its protocol version in the MCP-Protocol-Version header and in the _meta field (io.modelcontextprotocol/protocolVersion). The gateway discovers capabilities through server/discover. Version 2025-11-25 and earlier continue to use the initialize handshake.

You can use the following MCP operations with an AgentCore gateway:

Operation Description

tools/call

Invokes a specific tool with the provided arguments

tools/list

Lists all available tools provided by the gateway

prompts/list

Lists all available prompts provided by the gateway

prompts/get

Retrieves a specific prompt template, rendered with the provided arguments

resources/list

Lists all available resources provided by the gateway

resources/read

Reads the contents of a specific resource by URI

resources/templates/list

Lists all available resource templates provided by the gateway

elicitation/create

Requests additional input from the client during a tool call (server-initiated)

sampling/createMessage

Requests an LLM completion from the client during a tool call (server-initiated)

notifications/progress

Reports progress on long-running tool calls (server-initiated)

notifications/message

Sends log messages from the server during tool execution (server-initiated)

On version 2026-07-28, server-initiated interactions (elicitation/create and sampling/createMessage) use the multi round-trip requests (MRTR) pattern:

  1. The server returns an interim result with resultType set to input_required.

  2. The client provides the requested input on a retry of the original request.

The gateway delivers notifications (notifications/progress and notifications/message) only for requests that opt in to them. On version 2025-11-25 and earlier, the gateway delivers these interactions as server-initiated messages on the open stream.

The following topics describe how to invoke your AgentCore gateway:

Topics