Amazon Q Developer IP Indemnity When Code Reference Tracking Is Turned Off

Why the question is hard to answer from one document

Teams adopting an AI coding assistant often consider disabling code reference tracking. The usual reasons are to reduce friction for developers or to stop licence-flagged suggestions from appearing. The decision then touches three audiences. Security owns the configuration, legal owns the contractual position, and procurement owns the commercial terms that were signed.

The difficulty is that the relevant information is spread across three places: the AWS Service Terms, the Amazon Q Developer product documentation, and the administrator console. Each answers a different question. The service terms define when a remedy exists. The product documentation describes what a setting does. The console shows what was actually configured. A reliable conclusion needs all three, read for the same date and the same tier.

This guide does not give legal advice and does not state AWS contract positions. It sets out how to structure the review so that the people who can confirm those positions are asked the right questions.

Three layers, three sources of authority

Keeping the layers separate prevents a common error: inferring a contractual consequence from a product behaviour, or the reverse. A setting can change what developers see without changing what the contract requires, and a contract condition can exist without any visible effect in the editor.

• Contractual conditions: Authority: the AWS Service Terms version in force when the code was generated. Open question: whether any setting state or usage condition is required for the indemnity, and which tiers are covered.
• Technical behaviour: Authority: the Amazon Q Developer documentation for your tier. Open question: what reference tracking and filtering flag, and what happens to matching suggestions when they are off.
• Demonstrable evidence: Authority: your own retained records and what AWS makes available. Open question: whether you can show configuration and accepted suggestions at a specific point in time.

What an indemnity is, and what it is not

A vendor IP indemnity is a financial and legal remedy. It describes who bears defined costs if a covered claim arises, subject to conditions, exclusions and usually a notice and claims process. It does not tell you where a piece of code came from, which licence governs it, or whether that licence is compatible with how you distribute your software.

That distinction matters for security engineers because the two controls operate at different times. Provenance and licence visibility act before code reaches production, when a reviewer can still reject it. An indemnity acts after a dispute, when the question is who pays. Relying on the second in place of the first accepts risk that could have been avoided at review time.

It also means that the conditions of the indemnity should be read as a whole. Tier, user type, subscription state, how the output was used and whether the code was modified are the kinds of factors indemnities commonly address. Which of these apply to Amazon Q Developer is a matter for the contract text, not for inference.

What reference tracking and filtering do technically

In general terms, a reference or filtering feature in an AI coding assistant compares suggestions with known public code. It then either surfaces information about the match so a developer can assess the licence, or suppresses the suggestion. Turning it off removes that signal at the point of suggestion. It does not remove the underlying possibility that generated code resembles public code.

For a security engineer, the practical effect of disabling the feature is a loss of visibility. Developers stop receiving flags, and any record the feature would have produced no longer exists. If the organisation later needs to show how a suggestion was handled, that absence becomes part of the picture. The exact behaviour, administrator options and tier differences should be taken from the Amazon Q Developer documentation for your plan, and verified in a non-production test before rollout.

The general software-assurance principle that included components should be no less trustworthy than first-party code applies here as well. Accepted AI suggestions are included material, and review practices for third-party code are a reasonable baseline for them, although that principle addresses security assurance and not licensing.

Building evidence that survives the question later

If the indemnity or an audit question arises months after code was written, the useful evidence is specific and time-stamped. It includes the configuration in force on the relevant date, the tier and subscription state, the contract version, and a record of which suggestions were accepted into which repositories. Settings screenshots taken after the fact are weak evidence. A change history captured at the time is stronger.

Retention should be decided by security, legal and procurement together, not left to defaults. Whatever AWS makes available should be inventoried, and any gap between that and what the organisation needs should be filled with its own records.

This is also where independent code provenance helps. Trussed provides code provenance, meaning the origin, licence and security context of code, and enforces policy in the execution path for coding assistants: allow, redact, block, or escalate for human approval at the level of individual interactions and tool calls. The audit-ready evidence that enforcement produces shows how assistant output was handled, independently of any one vendor's setting. It complements a vendor indemnity and does not replace the contract.