# Amazon Q Developer

> Amazon Q Developer is an officially published IDE extension from Amazon Web Services. Anomity scores its risk at 45 out of 100 (medium). It matches 1 dangerous capability combination.

- **Canonical URL:** https://catalog.anomity.ai/extension/amazon-q-developer
- **Kind:** IDE extension
- **Publisher:** Amazon Web Services
- **Trust level:** official
- **Risk score:** 45/100 (medium)
- **Website:** https://aws.amazon.com/q/developer/
- **Last updated:** 2026-09-02
- **JSON:** https://catalog.anomity.ai/api/entries/extension/amazon-q-developer

## Description

Amazon Q Developer is AWS's AI coding assistant, shipping as an extension for VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, and Visual Studio. It offers inline completion, chat over your workspace, an agentic mode that can implement multi-file changes, and AWS-specific abilities such as explaining a CloudFormation template or upgrading a Java runtime across a codebase.

Its distinguishing capability is the cloud connection: signed in with AWS credentials, it can read account context and act against AWS APIs, which is materially broader than a code-completion extension. Combined with workspace reads and writes and outbound calls to the model service, that puts it in the higher band of this catalog. The upgrade and transformation features in particular make sweeping automated edits — review those as you would a large refactor PR, and scope the IAM role it authenticates with rather than reusing an administrator profile.

## Why it scored 45

The score starts at the catalog's neutral base of 50 and moves only through the signals below. The formula is published at https://catalog.anomity.ai/about — there is no model and no hidden heuristic.

| Signal | Contribution | Severity | Evidence |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Published by the vendor | -40 | trust offset |  |
| 2 high-risk capabilities: filesystem:write, credentials:access | +20 | critical |  |
| Credential theft risk (high) | +15 | high | Filesystem write combined with credentials access can plant persistent credential stealers. |

Clamped result: **45/100**, band **medium**.

## Capabilities

| Capability | Name | Security implication |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `filesystem:read` | Filesystem read | Can read files on the host system. Used for context, indexing, or analysis. |
| `filesystem:write` | Filesystem write | Can create, edit, or delete files on the host system. High-impact capability — anything from helpful edits to planting persistence. |
| `network:outbound` | Outbound network | Can make outbound network requests. Required for hosted model providers and remote APIs; also the path for data exfiltration if combined with read access. |
| `credentials:access` | Credentials access | Reads provider API keys, OAuth tokens, or other secrets from the host keychain or environment. |

## Dangerous combinations matched

### Credential theft risk (high)

Filesystem write combined with credentials access can plant persistent credential stealers.

Capabilities: `filesystem:write`, `credentials:access`

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Source: Anomity Catalog (https://catalog.anomity.ai/). Scoring methodology: https://catalog.anomity.ai/about. Machine-readable index: https://catalog.anomity.ai/llms.txt · https://catalog.anomity.ai/openapi.json