Amazon Directs Engineers To Use In-house Kiro Over Third-party AI Coding Tools

Key takeaways

The guidance, posted to Amazon's internal news site and signed by senior executives Peter DeSantis and Dave Treadwell, signals a strategic shift as the tech giant works to strengthen its position in the competitive AI development tools market.

The company will not support additional third-party AI tools

In the memo, Amazon stated: "While we continue to support existing tools in use today, we do not plan to support additional third-party, AI development tools."

The directive effectively discourages Amazon employees from adopting popular software coding platforms, including OpenAI's Codex, Anthropic's Claude Code, and tools from startup Cursor.

This guidance comes despite Amazon's substantial financial ties to these companies—the e-commerce giant has invested approximately $8 billion in Anthropic and secured a seven-year, $38 billion cloud-computing services agreement with OpenAI.

Peter DeSantis, senior vice president of AWS utility computing, and Dave Treadwell, senior vice president of eCommerce Foundation, wrote in the memo: "To make these experiences truly exceptional, we need your help. We're making Kiro our recommended AI-native development tool for Amazon."

Employee feedback is positioned as critical to Kiro's development

The memo emphasized the role of Amazon's engineering community in refining the platform.

"As part of our builder community, you all play a critical role in shaping these products, and we use your feedback to aggressively improve them," according to the internal communication.

The guidance follows Amazon's recent expansion of Kiro's availability to a worldwide audience last week, accompanied by new features designed to enhance the tool's capabilities.

Amazon launched Kiro in July 2025 as an AI-driven integrated development environment that allows developers to create software using natural language commands.

According to Amazon's description, Kiro differs from traditional AI coding assistants by emphasizing specification-driven development, generating requirements documents, system designs, and task lists before producing code.

The tool relies substantially on coding technologies from Anthropic, though not specifically on Claude Code itself.

October memo labeled OpenAI's Codex as "Do Not Use."

The recent directive represents an escalation of Amazon's previous internal guidance.

In October, the company revised its assessment of OpenAI's Codex to "Do Not Use" following approximately six months of evaluation, according to a memo reviewed by Reuters.

The competitive dynamics are particularly notable given the surging valuations in the AI coding tools sector.

Cursor recently completed a funding round that valued the startup at nearly $30 billion, underscoring the commercial stakes in this rapidly evolving market.

Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cursor did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Amazon's internal guidance.

Growing competition in the AI development tools market

Amazon's push for Kiro adoption occurs amid intensifying competition among tech giants to dominate the AI-powered software development tools sector.

Tools like Codex, Cursor, and Claude Code have become widely adopted methods for engineers to rapidly develop new services and applications.

The memo's timing coincides with broader industry movements, including Google's recent $2.4 billion technology licensing deal that brought AI coding software startup Windsurf's staff under its umbrella as part of efforts to enhance its Gemini AI models for developers.

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