Amazon is one of Anthropic’s largest investors and a strategic partner. However, within the company, employees are prohibited from using Claude Code for product code or in live projects without official approval. Instead, they recommend using Kiro, their own corporate AI assistant for programming, but it doesn’t seem to be a good fit for the company’s engineers.
Amazon is one of Anthropic’s largest investors and a strategic partner. However, within the company, employees are prohibited from using Claude Code for product code or in live projects without official approval. Instead, they recommend using Kiro, their own corporate AI assistant for programming, but it doesn’t seem to be a good fit for the company’s engineers.
In internal recommendations, companies encourage using Kiro instead of untested third-party tools (including Claude Code) to work with product code, Business Insider writes .
Kiro is based on Claude models, but uses a toolkit developed by Amazon Web Services, which distinguishes it from Claude Code. Employees still need official permission to use Claude Code to write production code.
The policy has sparked a wave of criticism on Amazon's internal forums, with around 1,500 Amazon employees reportedly supporting the official implementation of the Claude Code in one discussion.
“These restrictions have been particularly inconvenient for engineers who help sell Bedrock, Amazon’s platform that gives customers access to third-party AI services, including Claude Code. Some have questioned how they can convincingly promote a product they themselves are prohibited from using in their official work.
“Customers will ask why they should trust or use a tool if we haven’t approved it for internal use,” one employee wrote.
The episode highlights the complexity of the relationship between Amazon and Anthropic. While Amazon is struggling to develop and promote its own AI tools, it is also promoting its partner’s competing technology. Amazon is one of Anthropic’s largest investors, with a stake in the startup valued at more than $60 billion. Anthropic, in turn, is a major AWS customer: the company has committed to using Amazon’s cloud services and at least one million Trainium chips developed by Amazon.
“We’re seeing incredible gains in efficiency and development speed with Kiro, our customer base is growing rapidly, and we want to make sure all of our employees are leveraging these capabilities to build products faster for our customers,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “While we continue to support the existing tools that people use today, we have no plans to introduce support for additional third-party AI development tools.”
Amazon maintains a “strong strategic partnership with Anthropic,” and while there is no direct ban on Claude Code, the company does impose “stricter requirements specifically for the tools used to write product code,” the spokesperson added, noting that Amazon has a procedure for obtaining exceptions.
In an internal Amazon forum, an Amazon sales engineer pointed out the irony of being asked to sell Claude Code, even though the tool is not officially supported within the company. The employee wrote that they need to be able to “use, demonstrate, and develop” with Claude Code in order to fulfill Amazon’s directive to get as many customers as possible using the tool through the Bedrock platform.
Other Amazon engineers also debated whether the focus on Kiro was hindering productivity. Some argued that Claude Code was vastly superior to Amazon’s internal tool, and warned that forcing a weaker product could slow development.
“A tool that can’t keep up with the competition isn’t truly innovative,” wrote one Amazon employee. “And without competitiveness, Kiro’s only survival mechanism becomes coercion, not real value.”
Some employees said the frustration grew after Amazon previously made it clear that Claude Code had been vetted by security and legal departments for use on work projects, according to internal instructions and memos obtained by Business Insider. But that wording was later redacted and removed, employees said.
