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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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile we continue to support existing tools in use today, we do not plan to support additional third party, AI development tools,\u201d the memo read, as quoted by Reuters<\/a> at the time. \u201cAs part of our builder community, you all play a critical role shaping these products and we use your feedback to aggressively improve them.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a> to establish dominance in the quickly growing AI coding field \u2014\u00a0while seemingly leaving Amazon\u2019s Kiro long behind.<\/p>\n Half a year later, Amazon is singing a dramatically different tune. As Business Insider reports<\/a>, Amazon is officially throwing in the towel, succumbing to growing calls among employees for access to OpenAI\u2019s Codex and Anthropic\u2019s Claude.<\/p>\n The decision highlights how desperate AI companies\u2019 desire to maintain competitive edge \u2014\u00a0and give themselves the best chance of saving themselves from financial ruin<\/a> \u2014 has become. It\u2019s particularly awkward for Amazon, which has deep ties with several other key players as part of a cloud-driven, hyper-scaling strategy.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to mention its own doubling down on AI coding tools backfiring spectacularly<\/a>, with Amazon admitting recent outages were related to poorly implemented AI-generated code.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not a complete capitulation. Both coding tools will run on Amazon\u2019s 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\u2019s own flagship coding tool isn\u2019t up to snuff compared to the competition.<\/p>\n \u201cTo help you invent more for customers, we are expanding the agentic Al tools available to you,\u201d Haughwout told employees.<\/p>\n