Amazon employees are not allowed to use Anthropic’s Claude Code for production work without formal approval, says a Business Insider report. The restriction applies to live products and production code, even as other large tech companies encourage wider use of the AI coding tool. Specifically, this contrasts with software giant Microsoft that recently asked its engineers to test Claude Code alongside GitHub Copilot and share feedback on performance. As per the BI report, Amazon shared an internal guidance policy to its users last year, directing them to use Kiro, its in-house AI coding assistant. The guidance advised employees to rely on Kiro instead of non-approved third-party tools, including Claude Code, when writing production code.

Amazon employees ‘unhappy’

The move, the publication reports, triggered criticism across internal Amazon discussion forums. In one thread cited in the report, around 1,500 employees supported a request for Claude Code to be formally approved for internal use. Some employees said the restrictions created confusion, particularly for engineers working on AWS Bedrock, which offers customers access to third-party AI models, including Claude.“Customers will ask why they should trust or use a tool that we did not approve for internal use,” one employee said.Several employees questioned how they could promote Claude Code to customers while being restricted from using it themselves in official work. One employee wrote internally that customers may question why they should trust a tool that Amazon does not allow for internal production use.

Amazon employees argue Claude is better than Kiro

The restrictions have also led to internal debate over productivity. Some engineers argued that Claude Code performs better than Kiro for certain tasks and warned that limiting tool choice could slow development. Others said the lack of transparency around the decision not to formally approve Claude Code added to frustration, especially after earlier internal documents suggested it had cleared security and legal reviews. That language was later removed, according to the report.

No explicit ban on Claude: Amazon spokesperson

An Amazon spokesperson said that while Amazon maintains “a strong strategic partnership with Anthropic,” and that there’s no explicit ban on Claude Code. The company, however, applies “stricter requirements for the tools used to develop production code specifically,” the spokesperson added, stating that Amazon provides a process for seeking exceptions.He further said that the company is seeing improvements in efficiency and delivery from Kiro and wants employees to use the internal tool to deliver faster for customers. “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,” the spokesperson said as quoted in the report. “While we continue to support existing tools in use today, we do not plan to support additional, third-party AI development tools.“