Claude Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 available on Amazon Bedrock in AWS GovCloud (US); AWS publishes guide to running Claude Code against them

AWS says Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5 are available on Amazon Bedrock in AWS GovCloud (US). Access is through bedrock-runtime in US-West and US-East, and through bedrock-mantle in US-West only. The post is a setup guide for running Claude Code against these models: install, a login wizard, environment variables such as CLAUDE_CODE_USE_BEDROCK and AWS_REGION=us-gov-west-1, and the IAM permissions needed. The availability itself appears to have been announced earlier, so this post is a how-to rather than the original news.

US government bodies and contractors working under compliance rules can now point a coding assistant at models hosted inside a government-authorised AWS environment, rather than ruling the tools out. The practical gain is mainly for teams that already use GovCloud and need to show where the data goes. The audience is narrow, and any real decision still depends on each organisation's own compliance review.

The compliance claims are the weak spot. Sonnet 5 is said to hold FedRAMP Class D and DoD IL4/IL5, but Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 are only listed with FedRAMP Class D, so the newest models do not have the same stated coverage. The article itself tells readers to verify current status, and the 'supercharge' framing is marketing. The extraction also lists only an install script as primary evidence, not an authorisation record or model availability page.

1. 01Whether Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 gain DoD IL4/IL5 authorisation, checked against the official FedRAMP marketplace and DoD listings rather than the blog.
2. 02Whether bedrock-mantle extends beyond US-West, or the models appear in other GovCloud regions, within the next quarter.
3. 03Evidence of real adoption, such as named agencies or contractors using Claude Code on GovCloud, or any published pricing, quota or throughput limits for these GovCloud endpoints.