In November, Amazon leaders sent an internal memo to employees, pushing them to use its in-house code generating tool, Kiro, over third-party alternatives from competitors.
“While we continue to support existing tools in use today, we do not plan to support additional third party, AI development tools,” the memo read, as quoted by Reuters at the time. “As part of our builder community, you all play a critical role shaping these products and we use your feedback to aggressively improve them.”
It was an unusual development, considering the tens of billions of dollars the e-commerce giant has invested in its competitors in the space, including Anthropic and OpenAI. Both of these companies have been caught in a heated head-to-head race to establish dominance in the quickly growing AI coding field — while seemingly leaving Amazon’s Kiro long behind.
Half a year later, Amazon is singing a dramatically different tune. As Business Insider reports, Amazon is officially throwing in the towel, succumbing to growing calls among employees for access to OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude.
The decision highlights how desperate AI companies’ desire to maintain competitive edge — and give themselves the best chance of saving themselves from financial ruin — has become. It’s particularly awkward for Amazon, which has deep ties with several other key players as part of a cloud-driven, hyper-scaling strategy.
That’s not to mention its own doubling down on AI coding tools backfiring spectacularly, with Amazon admitting recent outages were related to poorly implemented AI-generated code.
In a note to staffers obtained by BI, VP of Amazon software builder experience Jim Haughwout announced Claude Code would be made available, with Codex following next week.
It’s not a complete capitulation. Both coding tools will run on Amazon’s Bedrock, a fully managed Amazon Web Services-based software that provides secure access to frontier AI models. But it does feel like a certain admission that the company’s own flagship coding tool isn’t up to snuff compared to the competition.
“To help you invent more for customers, we are expanding the agentic Al tools available to you,” Haughwout told employees.
Earlier this year, software developers at the company had grown frustrated over limitations Amazon had put on the use of Claude Code, as detailed in the November internal memo. Some said it was awkward to promote the use of Claude Code through AWS Bedrock while not being able to use it themselves at work.
“Customers will ask why they should trust or use a tool that we did not approve for internal use,” one employee wrote in a comment obtained by BI.
Meanwhile, given the unfortunate optics of opening the floodgates for Codex and Claude Code, an Amazon spokesperson told the publication in a statement that teams are still “primarily using” Kiro, claiming that 83 percent of engineers at the company are leaning on it.
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