Claude Cowork Launches on Amazon Bedrock with Consumption-Based Pricing

Anthropic announced Claude Cowork is now available on Amazon Bedrock, enabling organizations to run the desktop AI assistant through their AWS infrastructure.

Unlike Claude Enterprise, Claude Cowork on Bedrock uses consumption-based pricing through existing AWS billing agreements, with no per-seat licensing from Anthropic. The integration routes all model inference exclusively through Amazon Bedrock in the customer's AWS account.

Deployment and Configuration

Setup requires two steps: users download Claude Desktop, then IT administrators push configuration through device management systems like Jamf, Microsoft Intune, or Group Policy. The configuration specifies the model ID, Amazon Bedrock Inference Profile, authentication method, and organizational policies.

Organizations using LLM gateways can point Claude Desktop at their gateway URL through the same managed configuration.

Architecture and Data Flow

Claude Cowork has three outbound paths: model inference to Amazon Bedrock in configured AWS Regions, optional MCP server connections to approved endpoints, and aggregate telemetry to Anthropic (token counts, model ID, error codes, anonymous device ID). Telemetry can be disabled through configuration.

Amazon Bedrock does not store prompts, files, tool inputs and outputs, or model responses, and does not use them to train foundation models, according to AWS.

The integration supports:

• Authentication through AWS IAM or Amazon Bedrock API keys
• Network isolation via VPC endpoints
• Observability through OpenTelemetry export to Amazon CloudWatch
• Audit through AWS CloudTrail
• Consolidated AWS billing with granular cost attribution

Feature Set and Limitations

Claude Cowork includes projects, artifacts, memory, file upload and export, remote connectors, skills, plugins, and MCP servers. Features requiring Anthropic-hosted inference—including the Chat tab, Computer Use, and the Skills Marketplace—are not available because all inference routes through Amazon Bedrock.

The desktop application can delegate research, document analysis, data processing, and report generation. It can connect to external data sources through MCP servers for access to live documentation, web search, and other tools.

Availability

Claude Cowork is available on macOS and Windows in AWS Regions where Claude models are available on Amazon Bedrock. Organizations already running Claude Code in Amazon Bedrock can use the same infrastructure setup.

What This Means

This release extends Anthropic's enterprise distribution strategy by offering a third deployment option beyond direct API access and Claude Enterprise. The consumption-based pricing model removes the barrier of per-seat licensing for organizations that want to deploy AI assistants broadly across knowledge workers while maintaining AWS-level security controls. For AWS, this deepens Bedrock's competitive position by offering exclusive access to a packaged desktop application that competes with Microsoft's Copilot and Google's Workspace AI tools, all while keeping data within customers' AWS environments.