We have assessed the capabilities of sequence alignment functions coupled with the Kreȋn-SVM as AMP classification models. Our investigations indicate that the proposed methodology produces accurate classifiers of both general and species-specific antimicrobial activity of AMPs. The utility of our methodology is twofold. Firstly, since sequence alignment algorithms operate directly on amino acid sequences, these methods do not explicitly require the use of peptide features. This removes the need for the practitioner to decide which features to use, which is often a detailed and time-consuming process. Secondly, in all of our experiments, we used the local alignment score with its default hyperparameters. Having achieved such promising results, it prompts the question of whether more accurate models could be attained by also tuning the various hyperparameters of the local alignment score, such as the choice of scoring function, which we will explore in future work.