Add secure Web Search to Claude Desktop with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
Claude Desktop on Amazon Bedrock is limited to the model's knowledge cutoff without web search. In this post, we walk through connecting Claude Desktop to Web Search using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway, with JWT-based inbound authentication through AWS IAM Identity Center and Amazon Cognito.
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore enables Claude Desktop to access secure web search capabilities, expanding its knowledge beyond its training data cutoff. This integration allows users to retrieve up-to-date information, such as recent documentation updates, live pricing, and weather updates. The key to this integration is Amazon Bedrock AgentCore's Gateway, which connects Claude Desktop to a fully managed, Model Context Protocol (MCP)-compatible web search capability.
This web search capability is backed by an Amazon web index, spanning tens of billions of documents, and operates within AWS infrastructure, ensuring secure and private query traffic without external API keys.
The authentication process is secured using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) and managed through AWS IAM Identity Center. AWS IAM Identity Center handles user authentication via Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), and Amazon Cognito acts as a federation layer, issuing JWTs and validating them on each request. The entire authentication chain remains within AWS, eliminating the need for separate credentials or third-party identity providers.
To implement this integration, several prerequisites are required, including an AWS account with necessary permissions, admin access to the management account in AWS Organizations, preconfigured AWS IAM Identity Center for SSO access, Claude Desktop set up with Amazon Bedrock as the inference provider, and the latest versions of AWS CLI and Python.
The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and Boto3 SDK are used to create an Amazon Cognito user pool, configure the IAM Identity Center SAML application, wire the SAML IdP into Cognito, and create a Cognito app client. Once these steps are completed, Claude Desktop on Amazon Bedrock can seamlessly access secure web search using JWT-based inbound authentication.
Written by urgent.news from AWS Machine Learning's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
