Amazon is pushing onerous to make AI-assisted coding an on a regular basis behavior throughout the corporate. The goal is obvious—80 per cent of builders needs to be utilizing AI for coding duties at the very least as soon as every week, in response to the Monetary Occasions. However the firm is not leaving the selection of software as much as its engineers. It desires them on Kiro, its in-house AI coding assistant that launched in July 2025, and it is actively discouraging every thing else.An inside memo seen by Reuters final November laid it out plainly: “We don’t plan to help further third-party AI improvement instruments.” The memo, signed by two senior VPs—Peter DeSantis of AWS utility computing and Dave Treadwell of eCommerce Basis—named Kiro as Amazon’s “advisable AI-native improvement software.” OpenAI‘s Codex was flagged as “Do Not Use” after a six-month assessment. Anthropic’s Claude Code briefly received the identical tag earlier than the designation was reversed.A spokesperson instructed Enterprise Insider that about 70 per cent of Amazon’s software program engineers used Kiro at the very least as soon as in January. The corporate desires to push that quantity greater—and quick.
Engineers aren’t thrilled—1,500 of them backed Claude Code as a substitute
Not everyone seems to be on board. Round 1,500 Amazon workers endorsed the formal adoption of Claude Code in an inside discussion board dialogue, Enterprise Insider reported. Many argued it was merely the higher software. “A software that may’t preserve tempo with rivals presents no actual innovation,” one worker wrote, including that Kiro’s “solely survival mechanism turns into compelled adoption somewhat than real worth.”The frustration is sharpest amongst AWS gross sales engineers who’re tasked with promoting Claude Code to clients by means of Amazon’s Bedrock platform—whereas being barred from utilizing it for their very own manufacturing work. “Clients will ask why they need to belief or use a software that we didn’t approve for inside use,” one in every of them wrote. Amazon maintains there is not any outright ban on Claude Code however says it applies “stricter necessities” for manufacturing instruments.What makes this particularly sophisticated is that Amazon has invested $8 billion in Anthropic, the corporate behind Claude Code, and signed a $38 billion cloud computing take care of OpenAI, whose Codex software it additionally restricts internally.
Jassy’s larger play: $200 billion in AI spending, 30,000 fewer jobs
The Kiro push is one piece of a a lot bigger AI transformation below CEO Andy Jassy. He has instructed employees that AI-driven effectivity positive factors will shrink Amazon’s company workforce over time, and the numbers again that up. The corporate has minimize 30,000 company roles since October 2025—the largest discount in its historical past—whereas committing a report $200 billion in capital expenditure this 12 months, most of it directed at AI infrastructure and knowledge centres, the Monetary Occasions reported.At the same time as Amazon bets every thing by itself AI instruments, a few of its personal engineers aren’t satisfied. A number of instructed the Monetary Occasions they most well-liked Anthropic’s Claude over Amazon’s Nova fashions for coding. One AWS engineer put it bluntly to FT: “I did not even know we had a mannequin.”
