Signing up for Claude Platform on AWS provisions a new Anthropic organization tied to your AWS account, and that organization has a web UI: the Claude Console at platform.claude.com, where teams inspect usage, cost, workspaces, and resources like Files and Skills. But unlike a first-party Anthropic org, nobody in your company gets a Claude Console login. Access is federated through AWS IAM — your existing identity system decides who can enter, and users materialize on Anthropic's side only when they first walk through the door.
The flow, step by step
A user (or their SSO-assumed role) needs the IAM action aws-external-anthropic:AssumeConsole. With it, they open the Claude Platform on AWS page in the AWS Console and click "Open Claude Console." AWS issues a short-lived JWT — a signed token asserting the caller's AWS identity — and redirects the browser to platform.claude.com, where the token is exchanged for a Console session. No password, no separate MFA enrollment, no invitation email: the AWS Console session is the authentication, and everything your organization enforces in front of it (SSO, MFA, session policies) automatically fronts the Claude Console too.
On first sign-in, the user is provisioned just-in-time: an account is created in the Anthropic organization at that moment, marked with an "Account managed by AWS" indicator in the Console sidebar. There is no user list to pre-populate and, correspondingly, no Members page to manage — membership administration happens in AWS, by granting or revoking the IAM action. One quirk to know: the Console does not support organization switching for Claude Platform on AWS accounts. To work in a different org, sign out and re-enter through the AWS Console.
AssumeConsole is a route-less action — and not in most managed policies
AssumeConsole is what the IAM reference calls a route-less, authentication-layer action: it does not map to an API route and does not bind to a workspace ARN, so policies grant it with "Resource": "*". More importantly for rollouts, it is not included in the AnthropicReadOnlyAccess, AnthropicInferenceAccess, AnthropicLimitedAccess, or AnthropicSelfHostedEnvironmentAccess managed policies. Console access requires AnthropicFullAccess or an explicit custom grant — so if a teammate with read-only access reports the button doesn't work, that is by design, and the fix is a small custom policy statement granting aws-external-anthropic:AssumeConsole on *.
Admin vs. Developer: the second layer
Getting through the door is IAM's job; what you can do inside is a separate, Anthropic-side assignment. Two Console roles exist:
| Console role | What it grants |
|---|---|
| Admin | All Console pages and settings |
| Developer | Read access to usage, cost, rate limits, and workspaces |
These roles are assigned by an Anthropic account representative — they are not derived from your IAM permissions, so a user with AnthropicFullAccess in AWS can still be a Developer inside the Console. Plan for that during onboarding: decide who needs Admin and communicate it to your Anthropic contact, rather than assuming IAM breadth translates.
A final subtlety for security reviewers: the Console's pages split into two access paths. Usage, Cost, Limits, and Workspaces read organization metadata directly from Anthropic and bypass IAM action checks; pages like Files, Skills, Batches, Agents, and Sessions go through the AWS gateway, where the signed-in identity's IAM actions govern exactly as they would for API calls. API keys, Members, and Billing pages are absent entirely — those functions live in AWS. So denying someone GetFile in IAM does restrict what they see in the Console's Files page, but it will not hide organization-level usage numbers from anyone who can sign in.
AssumeConsole like any other privileged IAM action — grant it to humans through your normal role-assignment process, keep it out of workload roles entirely (applications have no business in a web console), and remember revoking the IAM action closes the door for future sessions.Where to go next
For the policy mechanics around route-less actions and workspace scoping, see the IAM actions reference and policy templates; for what the workspaces you'll see in the Console actually isolate, read workspace isolation.