AI agents run on file systems using standard tools to navigate directories and read file paths. 

The challenge, however, is that there is a lot of enterprise data in object storage systems, notably Amazon S3. Object stores serve data through API calls, not file paths. Bridging that gap has required a separate file system layer alongside S3, duplicated data and sync pipelines to keep both aligned.

The rise of agentic AI makes that challenge even harder, and it was affecting Amazon's own ability to get things done. Engineering teams at AWS using tools like Kiro and Claude Code kept running into the same problem: Agents defaulted to local file tools, but the data was in S3. Downloading it locally worked until the agent's context window compacted and the session state was lost.

Amazon's answer is S3 Files, which mounts any S3 bucket directly into an agent's local environment with a single command. The data stays in S3, with no migration required. Under the hood, AWS connects its Elastic File System (EFS) technology to S3 to deliver full file system semantics, not a workaround. S3 Files is available now in most AWS Regions.

"By making data in S3 immediately available, as if it's part of the local file system, we found that we had a really big acceleration with the ability of things like Kiro and Claude Code to be able to work with that data," Andy Warfield, VP and distinguished engineer at AWS, told VentureBeat.

The difference between file and object storage and why it matters

S3 was built for durability, scale and API-based access at the object level. Those properties made it the default storage layer for enterprise data. But they also created a fundamental incompatibility with the file-based tools that developers and agents depend on. "S3 is not a file system, and it doesn't have file semantics on a whole bunch of fronts," Warfield said. "You can't do a move, an atomic move of an object, and there aren't actually directories in S3."

Previous attempts to bridge that gap relied on FUSE (Filesystems in USErspace), a software layer that lets developers mount a custom file system in user space without changing the underlying storage. Tools like AWS's own Mount Point, Google's gcsfuse and Microsoft's blobfuse2 all used FUSE-based drivers to make their respective object stores look like a file system. 

Warfield noted that the problem is that those object stores still weren't file systems. Those drivers either faked file behavior by stuffing extra metadata into buckets, which broke the object...