Amazon has launched a new student programme for its AI-powered development tool, Kiro, offering eligible university students free access for a limited period.
Under the initiative, students can receive 1,000 credits per month for one year at no cost, allowing them to build and experiment with AI-assisted coding workflows without requiring a credit card.
The offer is currently available to students from select universities listed on Amazon’s official website, with plans to expand eligibility over time.
Kiro is an AI-powered development environment introduced by Amazon Web Services in 2025, designed to go beyond code completion by using autonomous agents and spec-driven development to generate production-ready code.
To access the student programme, users must sign up using a university-affiliated email and verify their status through a third-party service. Once verified, access is granted immediately.
The move places Amazon alongside other major tech firms pushing into student developer ecosystems, using free tiers to seed long-term adoption of AI-native tooling.
GitHub, for instance, offers Copilot Pro to verified students through its Student Developer Pack, while tools like Cursor and Lovable provide student discounts or free tiers.
The rollout also comes amid internal tensions at Amazon over its aggressive push to adopt AI coding tools. The company has encouraged engineers to use Kiro as a primary development tool and, in some cases, discouraged reliance on third-party alternatives.
The Guardian recently reported that some engineers from Amazon have raised concerns about reliability and workflow impacts, describing situations in which AI-generated code required significant manual corrections or slowed development
According to the report, several current and former employees described Kiro as unreliable in practice, with one developer stating that the tool “frequently hallucinates and generates flawed code”, requiring significant manual correction. Another engineer said the experience felt like “trying to AI my way out of a problem that AI caused.”
Workers also pushed back on the broader mandate to integrate AI into daily tasks, arguing that forced adoption was, in some cases, slowing them down rather than improving productivity. “This pressure to use [AI] has resulted in worse quality code, but also just more work for everyone,” one engineer told the publication
Meanwhile, a Financial Times report has also linked Kiro to operational incidents, such as internal system disruptions at Amazon, highlighting the risks of deploying autonomous agents in production environments.
Your reaction
Discussion
What's your take on this story?
No comments yet — be the first to share your view.