Renormalized Hamiltonians for gluons are constructed using a perturbative boost-invariant renormalization group procedure for effective particles in light-front QCD, including terms up to third order. The effective gluons and their Hamiltonians depend on the renormalization group parameter lambda, which defines the width of momentum space form factors that appear in the renormalized Hamiltonian vertices. Third-order corrections to the three-gluon vertex exhibit asymptotic freedom, but the rate of change of the vertex with lambda depends in a finite way on regularization of small-x singularities. This dependence is shown in some examples, and a class of regularizations with two distinct scales in x is found to lead to the Hamiltonian running coupling constant whose dependence on lambda matches the known perturbative result from Lagrangian calculus for the dependence of gluon three-point Green's function on the running momentum scale at large scales. In the Fock space basis of effective gluons with small lambda, the vertex form factors suppress interactions with large kinetic energy changes and thus remove direct couplings of low energy constituents to high energy components in the effective bound state dynamics. This structure is reminiscent of parton and constituent models of hadrons.

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