Amazon AGI

Amazon AGI is the organization inside Amazon that builds the company's largest in-house AI models, including the Amazon Nova family. It took shape in 2023 under Rohit Prasad, a longtime Alexa executive, and in December 2025 was placed inside a larger organization led by Peter DeSantis that also covers Amazon's custom chips and quantum computing.^[1][2][11] Despite its name, the group has, in GeekWire's words, "always been focused more on frontier models than on what the industry considers AGI," meaning still-theoretical systems that would match or surpass human intelligence.^[13] Its best-known unit, the Amazon AGI SF Lab in San Francisco, was formed in December 2024 around staff hired from Adept AI and produced the Amazon Nova Act browser agent. In July 2026 Amazon cut jobs in the AGI organization and closed the San Francisco site, while saying its frontier model research would continue under Pieter Abbeel.^[5][13][14]

Overview

Formation (2023)

In a change reported in August 2023, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy moved Rohit Prasad, then the head of Alexa, into a new role leading a central team for Amazon's largest language models, reporting directly to Jassy. In an internal email reported by The Information and Voicebot.ai, Jassy wrote that while Amazon had "built several LLMs around the company," it would "pool some resources centrally to build our most ambitious LLMs," with Prasad leading that team.^[1] Prasad had joined Amazon in 2013, early in Alexa's development, and was named senior vice president and head scientist for artificial general intelligence in mid-2023.^[2] By the launch of the Nova models in December 2024, Amazon was describing him as "SVP of Amazon Artificial General Intelligence."^[7]

Prasad took a practical view of the term. In a December 2025 interview with GeekWire he pushed back on what he described as Silicon Valley's tendency to portray AGI as "some kind of a god power," and spoke instead of building "generally intelligent systems that you can specialize for your purpose."^[2]

The Adept and Covariant deals (2024)

In June 2024 Amazon hired David Luan, the co-founder and CEO of the AI agent startup Adept, along with Adept co-founders Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen and Kelsey Szot and several other employees. Amazon also took a non-exclusive license to Adept's agent technology, its family of multimodal models and a few datasets. In a memo to staff, Prasad wrote that Luan would lead the "AGI Autonomy" team reporting to him and would also take over Amazon's existing Automations team. Adept kept operating independently under new CEO Zach Brock; Amazon said about 20 employees would remain there.^[3] The arrangement drew comparisons with Microsoft's hiring of Inflection AI co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission reportedly examined the Amazon-Adept deal in 2024.^[3][12]

In late August 2024 Amazon made a similar arrangement with the warehouse-robotics startup Covariant. Its co-founders Peter Chen, Pieter Abbeel and Rocky Duan, all former OpenAI researchers, joined Amazon along with about a quarter of Covariant's employees, and Amazon received a non-exclusive license to Covariant's AI models. Covariant continued as an independent company.^[4]

Nova models

On December 3, 2024, at AWS re:Invent, Amazon introduced Amazon Nova, a family of foundation models offered through Amazon Bedrock: the understanding models Nova Micro, Nova Lite and Nova Pro, with Nova Premier announced for the first quarter of 2025, plus the image generator Nova Canvas and the video generator Nova Reel.^[7] Prasad said Amazon had "about 1,000 Gen AI applications in motion" internally and that the models were meant to address problems builders faced with latency, cost, customization, grounding and agentic capabilities.^[7] The technical report and model card for the family, posted to arXiv in March 2025, lists "Amazon AGI" as its corporate author.^[8]

At re:Invent 2025 on December 2, 2025, Amazon announced the second-generation Nova 2 family (Nova 2 Lite, Nova 2 Pro, Nova 2 Sonic and Nova 2 Omni) and Nova Forge, a service that gives customers pre-trained, mid-trained and post-trained Nova checkpoints so they can mix their own data into training.^[10] Model specifications, benchmarks and pricing are covered in the Amazon Nova article.

Amazon AGI SF Lab

Amazon announced the Amazon AGI SF Lab on December 9, 2024, in a post written by Luan, identified as vice president of Autonomy and head of the lab, and Abbeel, identified as an Amazon Scholar in robotics.^[5] The post said the lab's initial focus would be "new foundational capabilities for enabling useful AI agents that can take actions in the digital and physical worlds," building on the work of Amazon's broader AGI team.^[5] It described a deliberately small team: "By keeping the team lean, we're able to maximize the amount of compute per person."^[5] The stated research bets included combining large language models with reinforcement learning for reasoning and planning, learned world models, and extending agents to physical environments.^[5]

The lab was seeded by the team hired from Adept, and Amazon said it wanted to hire a few dozen more people, including candidates from physics, mathematics and quantitative finance.^[5][6] An Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch that Abbeel would work closely with the lab.^[6] According to The Information, as relayed by GeekWire, the lab grew to about 80 people at its peak.^[14]

Nova Act

The lab's first public product was Nova Act, released as a research preview on March 31, 2025. It is a model and SDK for building AI agents that operate a web browser, in the same category as OpenAI's Operator and Anthropic's computer use tool.^[9] On Amazon's own tests, Nova Act scored 94% on ScreenSpot Web Text, compared with 88% for OpenAI's computer-using agent and 90% for Claude 3.7 Sonnet; TechCrunch noted that Amazon did not report results on more common agent evaluations such as WebVoyager.^[9] Luan told TechCrunch he defined AGI as "an AI system that can help you do anything a human does on a computer."^[9]

Nova Act became generally available as an AWS service on December 2, 2025. Amazon said it runs on a custom Nova 2 Lite model trained with reinforcement learning on hundreds of simulated web environments, and claimed 90% reliability on early customers' browser workflows.^[10]

Reorganization under Peter DeSantis (December 2025)

On December 17, 2025, Jassy told employees that Peter DeSantis, a senior vice president with more than 27 years at Amazon, would lead a new organization covering Amazon's "most expansive AI models," naming Nova and "the team we've called 'AGI'," together with silicon development (Graviton, Trainium and Nitro) and quantum computing. DeSantis reports directly to Jassy.^[11] In the same memo Jassy named Abbeel to lead "our frontier model research team (the team that builds the base model) in AGI," while continuing his work with Amazon's robotics team.^[11]

The memo also announced that Prasad had decided to leave Amazon at the end of 2025. Jassy credited him with leading "the creation of Amazon Nova and our AGI organization" over the previous two years, "building twelve state-of-the-art foundation models" that Jassy said were used by tens of thousands of companies.^[11] GeekWire noted that the announcement came two weeks after the Nova 2 launch.^[2]

Departures and the 2026 restructuring

Leadership exits

On February 24, 2026, Luan announced on LinkedIn that he would leave Amazon at the end of that week "to cook up something new," writing that "with AGI so close, I decided to spend 100% of my time on teaching AI systems brand new capabilities."^[12] In the post he said Nova Act had been adopted by customers including Hertz, 1Password and Amazon.com, and had reached the top of the REALBench agent leaderboard.^[12] GeekWire's review of LinkedIn profiles found that four of the five Adept co-founders who joined Amazon had left: Luan himself; Elsen, who left after four months and later joined Databricks; and Odena and Nye, who each left after about a year and became research scientists at Meta. Szot remained on the AGI team at the time.^[12]

Layoffs and closure of the San Francisco site (July 2026)

On July 22, 2026, Amazon confirmed that it had laid off an unspecified number of employees in the AGI organization, a move first reported by Reuters.^[13] A spokesperson said building large AI models remained "one of the most important things we're working on," but that the company was "sharpening our focus on the initiatives that matter most for customers," which meant "eliminating some roles within parts of our AGI organization."^[13] The cuts followed a series of smaller reductions after Amazon eliminated 16,000 jobs company-wide in January 2026.^[13]

Two days later Amazon confirmed that it was closing its San Francisco AGI site as part of those layoffs, news first reported by The Information. The company said its frontier model research would continue under Abbeel, that affected employees could look for other roles at Amazon, and that Nova Act remained available on AWS.^[14] GeekWire reported that more than a dozen of the Adept hires had left before the closure.^[14] Commentary such as The Next Web's read the closure as a sign that Amazon was stepping back from the frontier-model race and relying on AWS infrastructure and its investment in Anthropic.^[15]

On July 28, 2026, Business Insider reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that Amazon had begun deprecating most of its flagship Nova models, including the high-end Premier and Omni models, the Reel video model and the Canvas image model, and was moving resources to a frontier-model effort led by Abbeel. According to the report, the new flagship model was expected to debut at re:Invent later in 2026 and could carry the Nova name.^[16] An Amazon spokesperson told Reuters that the company was "continuing to invest in and support the Nova models our customers rely on today" and was "also investing in the next generation of frontier model research." Reuters noted that the Nova lineup also includes Nova 2 Lite, Nova 2 Sonic and Nova Forge.^[16]

Amazon's Bedrock documentation shows that several first-generation Nova models had already been moved to Legacy status in March 2026 and have since reached end of life:^[18]

The AGI changes are separate from AWS's agentic AI organization. On July 29, 2026, GeekWire reported that Swami Sivasubramanian's group, which oversees the teams behind Kiro, Amazon Quick and AWS Transform, had been expanded and renamed "Agentic AI & Emerging Technologies," and that the two organizations operate independently. An Amazon spokesperson said the company's commitment to building frontier models "is as strong as it's ever been."^[17]

Status

As of the most recent reporting (late July 2026), Amazon AGI continues as part of the DeSantis organization, with frontier model research led by Abbeel; the San Francisco lab site is closed and its founding leader has left.^[11][14] Nova Act remains available as an AWS service.^[14] Amazon also offers third-party models alongside Nova through AWS and has invested separately in Anthropic, which The Next Web described as Amazon's "big model bet."^[12][15]

Leadership

Timeline

References

1. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Eric Hal Schwartz, "Amazon Puts Alexa Leader Rohit Prasad in Charge of Generative AI Program," Voicebot.ai, August 3, 2023. voicebot.ai/...-in-charge-of-generative-ai-program
2. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6Todd Bishop, "Amazon AI chief Rohit Prasad leaving; Infrastructure exec Peter DeSantis to lead unified AI group," GeekWire, December 17, 2025. geekwire.com/...-desantis-to-lead-unified-ai-group
3. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Taylor Soper, "Amazon hires founders from well-funded enterprise AI startup Adept to boost tech giant's 'AGI' team," GeekWire, June 28, 2024. geekwire.com/...dept-to-boost-tech-giants-agi-team
4. ^1 ^2Taylor Soper and Todd Bishop, "Amazon hires Covariant founders, inks licensing deal with AI startup in latest 'reverse acquihire'," GeekWire, August 2024. geekwire.com/...p-in-latest-reverse-acquihire-deal
5. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9David Luan and Pieter Abbeel, "Amazon opens new AI lab in San Francisco focused on long-term research bets," Amazon Science, December 9, 2024. amazon.science/...cused-on-long-term-research-bets
6. ^1 ^2Kyle Wiggers, "Amazon forms an AI agent-focused lab led by Adept's co-founder," TechCrunch, December 9, 2024. techcrunch.com/...used-lab-led-by-adept-co-founder
7. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5"Introducing Amazon Nova, our new generation of foundation models," About Amazon, December 3, 2024. aboutamazon.com/...ficial-intelligence-bedrock-aws
8. ^Amazon AGI et al., "The Amazon Nova Family of Models: Technical Report and Model Card," arXiv:2506.12103, submitted March 17, 2025. arxiv.org/...2506.12103
9. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Maxwell Zeff, "Amazon unveils Nova Act, an AI agent that can control a web browser," TechCrunch, March 31, 2025. techcrunch.com/...ai-agent-that-uses-a-web-browser
10. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4"Amazon introduces new frontier Nova models, a pioneering Nova Forge service for organizations to build their own models, and Nova Act for building agents," About Amazon, December 2, 2025. aboutamazon.com/...c-ai-amazon-bedrock-nova-models
11. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9 ^10 ^11 ^12Andy Jassy, "Peter DeSantis to lead Amazon's AI models, silicon, and quantum computing efforts," About Amazon, December 17, 2025. aboutamazon.com/...santis-amazon-leadership-update
12. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7Todd Bishop, "Head of Amazon's AGI lab is leaving in latest exit from high-profile Adept startup deal," GeekWire, February 24, 2026. geekwire.com/...-exit-from-high-profile-adept-deal
13. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6Todd Bishop, "Amazon cuts jobs in AGI group as it puts more focus on customer-facing AI," GeekWire, July 22, 2026. geekwire.com/...s-more-focus-on-customer-facing-ai
14. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8Todd Bishop, "Amazon confirms it's closing key AI site in San Francisco but says work on its top models continues," GeekWire, July 24, 2026. geekwire.com/...s-work-on-its-top-models-continues
15. ^1 ^2Ana Maria Constantin, "Amazon just shut its AGI Lab, and quit a race it never led," The Next Web, July 24, 2026. thenextweb.com/...b-frontier-model-retreat-layoffs
16. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Reuters, "Amazon winds down most flagship AI models in strategy overhaul, Business Insider reports," via The Spokesman-Review, July 28, 2026. spokesman.com/...-most-flagship-ai-models-in-strat
17. ^Todd Bishop, "A bigger role for Swami: Amazon's agentic AI chief gets broader mandate to shape emerging tech," GeekWire, July 29, 2026. geekwire.com/...der-mandate-to-shape-emerging-tech
18. ^"Model lifecycle (Legacy)," Amazon Bedrock User Guide, AWS documentation, accessed October 29, 2026. docs.aws.amazon.com/...model-lifecycle-legacy