Amazon is pulling out all the stops to challenge Microsoft’s AI advantage, offering its CodeWhisperer AI coding assistant for free.

Amazon unveiled its Bedrock AI platform Friday in an effort to take on Microsoft and Google. The company is determined to make it as easy as possible to use its tools, even providing free access to CodeWhisperer.

Steve Roberts, an AWS Senior Developer Advocate, announced the news in a blog post:

Using just an email account, you can sign up and, in just a few minutes, become more productive writing code—and you don’t even need to be an AWS customer. For business users, CodeWhisperer offers a Professional tier that adds administrative features, like SSO and IAM Identity Center integration, policy control for referenced code suggestions, and higher limits on security scanning. And in addition to generating code suggestions for Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and C#, the generally available release also now supports Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripting, SQL, and Scala. CodeWhisperer is available to developers working in Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, CLion, GoLand, WebStorm, Rider, PhpStorm, PyCharm, RubyMine, and DataGrip IDEs (when the appropriate AWS extensions for those IDEs are installed), or natively in AWS Cloud9 or AWS Lambda console.

Making CodeWhisperer available for free is a smart move for Amazon, one that should help the company as it battles Microsoft and Google for dominance in the AI market.