Amazon Verified Permissions MCP Server

The Aws Avp Mcp server bridges the gap between AI assistants and Amazon Verified Permissions (AVP), a fine‑grained access control service that lets you manage who can do what in your AWS environment. By exposing AVP as an MCP endpoint, the server allows Claude and other AI clients to query permissions, evaluate policies, and retrieve policy documents on demand. This eliminates the need for developers to write custom adapters or embed AWS SDK calls directly in their prompts, enabling a seamless, declarative approach to security checks within natural‑language workflows.

At its core, the server implements three primary capabilities. First, it provides a resource endpoint that returns AVP policy definitions and metadata, allowing an assistant to display or analyze the current access rules. Second, it offers a tool that evaluates a given action against an AVP policy set and returns whether the request is permitted, denied, or indeterminate. Finally, it exposes a prompt that can be used to generate policy‑aware responses or explanations directly from the AI. These features give developers a single, consistent interface for all permission‑related queries, making it easier to embed compliance checks into chat or code generation sessions.

The value proposition for developers is clear: with the MCP server in place, an AI assistant can answer questions like “Can user X delete this S3 bucket?” or “What policies apply to service Y in region Z?” without the assistant having to manage AWS credentials, SDKs, or permission parsing logic. The server handles authentication through standard MCP mechanisms, ensuring that only authorized AI sessions can interrogate AVP. This integration is particularly useful in DevOps pipelines, policy‑as‑code reviews, and real‑time troubleshooting where instant visibility into permission outcomes is critical.

Typical use cases include:

• Policy auditing – automatically scan a project’s AVP policies and flag potential over‑privileged or conflicting rules.
• Compliance reporting – generate human‑readable summaries of who can access which resources, aiding audit trails.
• Secure coding assistants – have the AI refuse to suggest code that would violate existing AVP rules or warn developers when a proposed change introduces new risks.
• Operational triage – quickly determine whether an access error is due to a missing policy or an incorrect resource ARN, reducing incident response time.

What sets this server apart is its tight coupling to Amazon’s native permission model. Unlike generic RBAC adapters, it understands AVP’s policy language, condition keys, and hierarchical resource structures out of the box. This ensures that AI responses are not only accurate but also aligned with AWS’s security best practices, giving developers confidence that the assistant’s guidance reflects the true state of their cloud environment.