I use AWS all day every day at my day job, and our spending is in the range of a new Honda Accord, every month. I also have a personal AWS account, which I use for this blog and for any other hobby projects I might get into. My spending in the personal account is around $2/month.
I have access to Claude Sonnet 4.6 in my personal account and it works great, but I’d like to stay current and I’d like to start using Claude Sonnet 5 via AWS Bedrock. But when I try to use Claude Sonnet 5 in the Bedrock Model Playground, for example, AWS tells me that I don’t have access to the model:
anthropic.claude-sonnet-5 is not available for this account. You can explore other available models on Amazon Bedrock. For additional access options, contact AWS Sales at https://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/sales-support/
Umm, okay, that’s weird. So I opened a ticket with the Sales team, as the error message directed me to do, and I also opened a ticket with the Support team.
The Sales team, which is the team mentioned in the error message, replied right away but they wouldn’t help me at all. They told me that only the Support team could help me.
The Support team ignored me for 26 days, then finally got back to me and said:
Access to certain Amazon Bedrock foundation models, including Claude Sonnet 5, depends on additional eligibility factors beyond the standard prerequisites. These factors include account usage history and continued engagement with AWS services. At this time, access to Claude Sonnet 5 is not available for your account.
My account is 14 years old, with usage/spending every month of those 14 years and zero missed payments, so I wonder if it’s less about my “account usage history and continued engagement” and more about my small monthly spend.
So if you found this page by Googling for the error message, just know what you might be getting into. AWS might not want your business. Presumably their customer obsession applies to all accounts equally, but some accounts are more equal than others.