AWS releases Strands Decider 2B, an open-source decision model, under Apache 2.0

On October 1, 2026 the Strands team at AWS announced Strands Decider 2B, a 2-billion-parameter "decision model" that picks between supplied options or assigns a score with a confidence value instead of generating text. The announcement says the model starts from the Qwen3.5-2B model with its language-model head replaced by a small pointer head and the base fine-tuned with a LoRA adapter, and that it is meant for agent workflows such as those built with the Strands Harness SDK. The code, training data, and scripts are published on GitHub and the weights on Hugging Face; the repository and model card both list the Apache 2.0 license. AWS describes it as a Strands Labs project and says it is unsuited to text-generation tasks such as coding, chat, or summarization.123