Amazon opens access to Claude Code and Codex for all employees
Amazon has officially extended access to Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex to its entire workforce, reversing months of internal policy that had restricted engineers to the company's homegrown coding assistant Kiro and required special authorization for any third-party AI tool.
The shift was announced in an internal memo from Jim Haughwout, Amazon's vice president of software developer experience, in which he told employees that Claude Code is now available company-wide, with Codex set to follow on May 12. Both tools will run through Amazon Bedrock and be managed via AWS, eliminating the need for individual teams to configure infrastructure or handle capacity independently. A company spokesperson confirmed that Amazon is "standardizing" access to both tools, removing the requirement for separate approvals.
The move marks a significant reversal. As recently as November 2025, an internal memo designated Kiro as the company's preferred AI coding tool and stated that Amazon had no plans to support additional third-party AI development tools. By February 2026, internal frustration had grown among engineers who preferred Claude Code or who were responsible for selling it to external AWS customers while being barred from using it in-house on production code.
The deployment reflects the deepening relationships Amazon has built with the major AI laboratories. In late February, Amazon announced a $50 billion investment in OpenAI as part of a broader $110 billion funding round that valued the company at $730 billion. Under that agreement, OpenAI committed to consuming two gigawatts of Trainium capacity through AWS and to spending $100 billion on Amazon's cloud infrastructure over eight years. OpenAI officially made its latest models and Codex available on Amazon Bedrock on April 28. Amazon has also invested $8 billion in Anthropic, whose Claude models already power the underlying capabilities within Kiro itself.
Despite the expanded access, Amazon has been clear that Kiro is not being sidelined. The company had previously set an 80 percent weekly usage target for Kiro among its developer base, and its spokesperson emphasized that Kiro remains in active use for agentic coding tasks. By routing external tools through its own cloud infrastructure, Amazon retains oversight of data security and compliance while acknowledging that a single proprietary tool cannot meet the full range of its workforce's needs. The decision positions Amazon as both a consumer and a distribution platform for the leading AI coding tools on the market, reinforcing AWS's role as the primary gateway through which enterprise AI capabilities are deployed.
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