The general liability cap lives in the separate Customer Agreement, but this document adds many total exclusions on top of it. Beta services come as is with all warranties disclaimed and liability capped at what you paid for the beta in the past year. AWS accepts zero liability for emergency call failures, for patent claims over media encoding, for actions taken on your instructions in managed services, and for third party software, where Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat each disclaim all damages. Several clauses strip both defense and payment obligations entirely.
This document layers several one sided indemnities on top of whatever the Customer Agreement says. You must indemnify AWS for marketplace tax issues, for anything you or your visitors do at a Data Transfer Terminal facility, for disputes with third party sellers, and for a broad range of emergency calling failures. The notable counterweight is real: AWS will defend you against copyright and IP claims over output from its main generative AI services, and that obligation is not subject to the damages cap.
These terms bind you the moment you use any AWS service, and they pull in dozens of other documents by reference: the Customer Agreement, data addenda, acceptable use policy, trademark guidelines, third party EULAs, and policies posted at web addresses AWS can change. Using one service can automatically subject you to the terms and fees of other associated services. At 294,000 characters with no plain language summary, no ordinary customer can realistically read what they are agreeing to.
The formal amendment mechanism for these Service Terms sits in the Customer Agreement, but everything visible here points one direction: AWS changes things unilaterally. Beta terms and usage limits can change at any time, marketplace features and third party integrations can vanish without prior notice, prices for future purchases can change at any time, and the incorporated policies live at web addresses AWS controls and updates. The saving graces are that price changes never touch commitments you already bought and that a few changes, like Windows and RHEL rate increases, carry 30 days notice.
For ordinary content violations AWS gives you notice and 2 business days to fix the problem before removing content or suspending service, which is fairer than most platforms. But AWS can act without prior notice for illegal or disruptive content, beta access can be cut at any time, and if a management account misses a payment every linked member account gets suspended too. Detailed suspension and termination rights sit in the separate Customer Agreement, so this is a partial picture.
You keep ownership of your content and of output you generate with AWS AI services, and AWS promises not to use your content or usage data to compete with you, which is a strong protection. The catch is in the defaults: content you publish through sharing features like ECR Public or CodeCatalyst can carry broad, irrevocable licenses if you do not set your own terms, AWS owns any feedback you give on beta services, and AWS claims the right to benchmark your products even if your own terms forbid it.
This is the riskiest area for your wallet. Reserved instances, savings plans, capacity blocks, and similar commitments are noncancellable and nonrefundable, and you keep owing the full term even if you stop using AWS entirely. Fees for messaging and email services keep accruing even when delivery fails for reasons outside AWS's control. Training subscriptions auto renew and AWS charges any payment method on file without further notice. On the plus side, you can request service credits for outages, price changes never hit already purchased commitments, and pro rata refunds apply when AWS itself cancels a program.
AWS builds in a serious privacy framework: GDPR standard contractual clauses, a data processing addendum, CCPA terms, deletion of your content after account closure, and the Nitro System design that blocks AWS staff from reading your compute instances. The main weakness is that many AI and security services use your processed content to improve AWS technology by default, with storage possibly outside your chosen region, and you must find and configure an opt out. AWS also shares account and usage information with partners like Oracle, Broadcom, NetApp, and IBM for support purposes.