Amazon is one of Anthropic’s largest investors and a key partner in bringing the startup’s AI models and products to customers.
Inside Amazon, however, employees aren’t allowed to use Anthropic’s Claude Code for production code or for live products without formal approval.
That disconnect became more visible last fall, when Amazon rolled out internal guidance steering teams toward Kiro, its in-house AI coding assistant, according to internal messages from that period seen by Business Insider.
The guidance encourages using Kiro over non-approved third-party tools, including Claude Code, for production code. Kiro runs on Claude models, though with Amazon Web Services-built tooling, which makes it different from Claude Code. Employees still need formal approval to use Claude Code for production code.
The policy prompted criticism across internal Amazon forums. In one discussion thread, roughly 1,500 Amazon employees endorsed the formal adoption of Claude Code, according to the messages.
The restrictions have been particularly awkward for engineers who help sell Bedrock, Amazon’s platform that offers customers access to third-party AI services, including Claude Code. Some questioned how they could credibly promote a product they are not permitted to use themselves in official work.
“Customers will ask why they should trust or use a tool that we did not approve for internal use,” one employee wrote.
The episode highlights the complexity of Amazon’s relationship with Anthropic. While Amazon is racing to build and promote its own AI tools, it is also marketing a partner’s competing technology. Amazon is one of Anthropic’s largest investors, with a stake valued at more than $60 billion. Anthropic, in turn, is a major AWS customer, committing to use Amazon’s cloud services and at least one million of Amazon’s Trainium chips.
“We are seeing incredible improvements in efficiency and delivery from Kiro, our customer growth is rapidly accelerating, and we want to make sure our internal employees all take advantage of this capability to deliver faster for our customers,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “While we continue to support existing tools in use today, we do not plan to support additional, third-party AI development tools.”
Amazon maintains “a strong strategic partnership with Anthropic,” and while there’s no explicit ban on Claude Code, the company applies “stricter requirements for the tools used to develop production code specifically,” the spokesperson said, noting that Amazon provides a process for seeking exceptions.
An Anthropic spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“Survival mechanism”
In one of the internal forums, an Amazon sales engineer flagged the irony of being asked to sell Claude Code even though it isn’t formally supported inside the company. The employee wrote that they need to be able to “use, demo, and build” with Claude Code to support Amazon’s directive to get more customers to use it through Bedrock.
Other Amazon engineers also debated whether the emphasis on Kiro was hindering productivity. Some argued that Claude Code outperformed Amazon’s in-house tool and warned that forcing adoption of a weaker product could slow development.
“A tool that can’t keep pace with rivals offers no real innovation,” one of the Amazon employees wrote. “And without competitive strength, Kiro’s only survival mechanism becomes forced adoption rather than genuine value.”
Claude Code has become one of the most widely used AI coding services, and it underpins many other similar offerings from other providers. An Amazon spokesperson said about 70% of the company’s software engineers used Kiro at least once in January.
In one forum thread, a manager overseeing Amazon’s internal developer tools said he understood the “frustration” and “significant” interest in Claude Code, citing about 1,500 internal endorsements calling for its formal adoption.
Some employees said frustration deepened after Amazon had previously indicated that Claude Code had cleared security and legal review for production use, according to an internal guideline and messages reviewed by Business Insider. That language was later edited and removed, employees said.
Others criticized the lack of transparency around the decision not to formally adopt Claude Code, asking what data informed the decision.
“The trend is clear,” one employee wrote internally. “More and more people would like to start using Claude Code and be officially supported by Amazon.”
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