Claude Cowork now runs on Bedrock, Vertex and Foundry. A quiet win for EU legal teams.
Let me start with a small apology: I know, yet another Claude-related post. So much is happening in this space, and I’d rather keep trying to make sense of it for you in something close to real time than let the important bits slip by unnoticed.
And this one is worth it, because it touches the question I get asked most.
Almost without exception, it is about privacy, security and privilege. Rightly so. And where the processing actually happens sits at the heart of all three.
I wrote about this earlier in a piece on choosing a secure (legal) AI. One of the more uncomfortable realities for European legal teams is that the major frontier labs, OpenAI and Anthropic included, still do most of their processing in the US. For a lot of teams outside of the US, that is a legitimate concern.
With the current surge of interest in Claude, and in Claude Cowork in particular (the non-developer counterpart to Claude Code, built for longer-running agentic work), there is an update worth flagging.
Until now, the only real route to EU-hosted inference ran through enterprise deals, which for most legal teams is simply out of reach. Since yesterday, Cowork and Claude Code are also available via Bedrock, Vertex and Foundry, with EU hosting on offer through each.
For the sharp-eyed: Claude for Word, Excel and PowerPoint already offered the same gateway pattern to Bedrock, Vertex and Azure. What is new is that Cowork, the more agentic and arguably more consequential product for complex legal work, now joins them.
One caveat worth flagging: the data-residency and “no conversation data sent to Anthropic” guarantees currently apply only to the Vertex and Bedrock routes. Equivalent assurances for Foundry are said to follow, but are not yet in place.
And these are of course still American-owned hyperscalers, so this is not sovereignty in the strictest sense. But it does materially widen the set of teams who can use Cowork without routing their data across the Atlantic. For many firms and in-house departments, that is a meaningful step in the right direction.
If you want to dig deeper: