Colleges and universities can now acquire Anthropic’s newest AI education tool through their existing Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts thanks to a partnership between the two vendors announced last week. Claude for Education, Anthropic’s AI assistant tailored to teaching and learning, was added to AWS Marketplace last month as a push for simplifying AI acquisition in the education sector.
The move does not introduce a new product — Claude for Education was announced in April with campuswide deployments at institutions like Northeastern University and the London School of Economics and Political Science — but a new distribution pathway. AWS Marketplace is Amazon’s cloud-based software store, selling applications that run on its infrastructure.
By tapping into AWS Marketplace, institutions can give students, faculty and staff access to Claude while going through AWS’ consolidated billing and procurement processes. Universities already working with AWS can leverage their established AWS agreements, manage subscriptions centrally and use AWS support structures, according to the news release.
This new option differs from Claude access through Amazon Bedrock, a service for building generative AI applications and agents. Through Bedrock, institutions have access to Claude models that require custom application development.
Claude for Education as listed on AWS Marketplace is positioned as a plug-and-play tool available to users of all technological abilities without the need for in-house AI developers. Because Claude for Education integrates with systems like Canvas, Google Workspace and GitHub, users can incorporate it into existing workflows without needing to switch tools or build custom tools.
The AWS Marketplace listing does not change the features available. With Claude, students can engage with course material through Learning Mode, which uses Socratic questioning to guide them toward answers without generating material they might claim as their own. Faculty and researchers can create shared project workspaces that include documents and custom instructions, enabling collaboration on course materials, research tasks or institutional procedures. Research teams, in particular, can upload large volumes of text, including academic papers and data sets, into a single conversation with Claude for analysis.
To meet institutional requirements around privacy and compliance, the news release said, Claude for Education includes enterprise-level security features like single sign-on and role-based access controls. Institutions can set granular permissions by role, such as student, faculty or administrator, and maintain oversight through audit logs and data retention controls.