Amazon Bedrock is a service for building generative AI applications, offered on cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS). The platform acts as a kind of marketplace, allowing businesses to pick which AI models they would like to build their generative AI apps on top of and customize with their own proprietary data.
What Is Amazon Bedrock?
Amazon Bedrock is a service for building generative AI applications. The platform allows companies to choose which AI models they would like to build their apps on top of, and then customize them with their own proprietary data through Amazon Web Services.
“Amazon Bedrock is leading the industry to a new place,” Sherry Marcus, director of Applied Science at AWS, told Built In. “A place where customers can easily choose from different high-performing [models] from leading AI companies, get access to a broad range of capabilities they need to build generative AI applications, and simplify the development while maintaining privacy and security.”
What Is Amazon Bedrock?
Amazon Bedrock — also known as AWS Bedrock — is an AWS service that enables developers to create their own generative AI apps by giving them access to the foundation models of Amazon and AI startups. Foundation models are large language models that are trained on massive volumes of data and can serve as the cornerstones of new applications. Through AWS Bedrock, developers can choose between foundation models from companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Meta and Stability.ai.
The idea is to provide developers with the AWS cloud as an environment for building and hosting their generative AI applications. This speeds up the app development process and makes generative AI technology more accessible to a wider audience. Developers simply combine their data with the model of their choice to customize their application. As a result, any user can quickly craft chatbots, text generators and image generators, among other tools.
Companies big and small are eager to implement generative AI into their own business operations as a way to enhance productivity and cut costs. While Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google have raced out to a fast start, Amazon Bedrock is Amazon’s biggest move yet into this rapidly emerging sector and promises to reshape the generative AI landscape.
What Makes Amazon Bedrock Different?
Choice and Flexibility
The element of choice makes Amazon Bedrock different from pretty much any other generative AI tool today. While other companies like Microsoft and Google offer access to only their own models, AWS Bedrock allows companies to pick from a variety of foundation models made by AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI and, of course, Amazon itself. As Marcus put it, this democratizes access to generative AI technology.
“What we like about Amazon Bedrock is they don’t restrict to one single model, or a set of specific models from a specific vendor,” Jeff Reihl, CTO of legal tech company and Amazon Bedrock customer LexisNexis, told Built In. “It gives us, as a user, a lot of options because we’re going to use the best model to solve the customer’s problem at the best price and the best performance.”
Security
Because Amazon works with all of these foundation model vendors directly, they actually manage the model on behalf of those companies within their own ecosystem. So if a business uses one of the models, all of the proprietary data they plug in stays within AWS, and it is managed and protected to Amazon’s standards. This can give companies a lot of peace of mind when it comes to data governance and compliance with any existing privacy legislation, according to Travis Rehl, senior vice president of product and services at cloud company and AWS partner Innovative Solutions.
AWS Bedrock also offers encryption features and HIPAA eligibility, making it useful for a variety of contexts. In contrast, neither ChatGPT nor Bard are HIPAA compliant. Both have sparked security concerns as well.
Personalization
Because companies can feel more comfortable using their own data in these models, they can create more personalized generative AI products and services that are helpful to their unique needs. Leveraging these models and their own data, businesses can create what Amazon calls AI “agents” that automatically execute tasks, like processing insurance claims or creating ad campaigns, without compromising the security of their sensitive data.
While OpenAI has given users the ability to customize ChatGPT, both ChatGPT and Bard already come with their own data and limitations. There may be some room for flexibility, but it’s not the same as having different models to choose from.
Benefits of Amazon Bedrock
Customization
AWS Bedrock places the foundation models of Amazon and a range of startups at the fingertips of developers, who can then select the models that suit their needs and equip them with their own company data for a more personalized experience.
Accuracy and Performance
Because developers can integrate their company data with AWS Bedrock’s foundation models, they can equip AI generative tools with knowledge related to their companies and industries, which can then produce more accurate and relevant responses.
Data Security
Amazon Bedrock follows data security best practices like encrypting all data, refraining from training foundation models on user input and preventing third parties from accessing this data. Developers can further bolster their security with features like HIPAA eligibility.
Drawbacks of Amazon Bedrock
Data Privacy
Despite data security features offered by AWS Bedrock, the creation and use of generative AI apps that store user data is cause for concern. Users may not feel comfortable with their data being collected, especially if any sensitive information is involved.
Ethical Dilemmas
Amazon Bedrock’s foundation models are created by humans and further trained by humans, leaving room for biases to creep in. Developers and companies need to take extra steps to ensure unconscious biases don’t affect the development and behavior of generative AI tools.
Potential Monopoly Concerns
The nature of AWS Bedrock as a foundation model marketplace means this service can expand to include other companies. If competition isn’t stiff enough, Amazon’s generative AI presence may grow too large and monopolize resources in the field.
Ways to Use Amazon Bedrock
The inherent flexibility of foundation models and services provided by Amazon Bedrock makes it easy to build generative AI products for a wide variety of tasks, powering everything from search to content creation.
Chatbots
AWS Bedrock can help companies build their own chatbots, or virtual assistants that understand user requests, break down tasks, engage in conversations to collect information and take actions to fulfill those requests.
For instance, data analytics and risk assessment firm Verisk uses Amazon Bedrock to power its AskMax chatbot, which gives users quick contextual answers to support their questions, potentially eliminating hours of manual search.
Search
Generative AI-powered search engines can find and synthesize relevant information to answer questions based on a large corpus of data.
LexisNexis created its own search engine, called Lexis+ AI, which allows users to easily search for legal and regulatory documents. It also has a conversational AI component, which means it can carry on conversations with users and refine their queries, Reihl said.
Text Summarization
Amazon Bedrock helps companies create tools for text summaries, providing abridged versions of articles, books, blog posts and any other writing.
LexisNexis also incorporated this capability into its Lexis+ AI so that users don’t have to read hundreds of pages of legal documents on their own.
Text Generation
Generative AI is perhaps best known for its ability to create new pieces of original content, such as blog posts, social media posts and marketing emails.
Web hosting company GoDaddy uses AWS Bedrock to help its customers accelerate their content creation, helping customers fill out their online business pages and more efficiently connect with relevant suppliers, consumers and funding opportunities.
Image Generation
Another popular application of generative AI is image generation, which automatically creates artistic (and sometimes photorealistic) images or animations. These can be helpful in creating presentations, websites and ad campaigns. That’s how online travel booking site Booking.com uses Amazon Bedrock.
Amazon’s Growing Investment in AI
Looking ahead, the generative AI market is expected to eclipse $1 trillion within the next decade, according to an analysis from Bloomberg Intelligence. And skyrocketing demand for new generative AI products — powered by new products and assistants that accelerate their creation — gives cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft and Google an opportunity to claim a substantial piece of that pie, as businesses shift more workloads to the public cloud.
In fact, generative AI could increase the ROI of cloud computing platforms by as much as 110 percent. As the largest cloud provider in the world by market share, AWS can combine its cloud computing prowess with AWS Bedrock to gain a stronger foothold in the generative AI space.
Amazon has also developed its own chips made specifically for training AI models with less computing power, a move that will likely help the company compete with Microsoft and Google as tech companies scramble to offset the global chip shortage. As of September 2025, Amazon’s chips will be used by Anthropic — a top competitor to OpenAI — to build, train and deploy its future foundation models, opening a major new front in the ongoing AI arms race.
Still, generative AI is a bit of a “Wild West,” as Reihl put it. It can be a threat to data privacy, produce biased results and infringe on copyright and other laws. Amazon has been a vocal supporter of responsible AI, making voluntary commitments toward AI safety at the behest of the White House and speaking at the United Nations. But it remains to be seen how any future AI regulation will affect Amazon and other industry giants.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Amazon Bedrock?
Amazon Bedrock is a service for building generative AI applications. The platform allows companies to choose which AI models they would like to build their apps on top of, and then customize them with their own proprietary data through Amazon Web Services.
Is Amazon Bedrock generally available?
Yes — Amazon Bedrock became generally available in September of 2023.
When did Amazon Bedrock launch?
Amazon Bedrock was first launched in preview in April of 2023 as part of a set of new tools for building generative AI on AWS. It was then made generally available in September of 2023.
