Amazon's AGI lab leader David Luan exits after two years to focus on teaching AI new capabilities

Amazon's AGI lab leader is leaving

After less than two years at Amazon, David Luan, the head of Amazon's San Francisco AI lab, is departing the company. Luan announced the update in a post on LinkedIn on Tuesday, saying, "I'll be leaving Amazon at the end of this week to cook up something new." He added that, "There's incredible work to be done at Amazon and opportunities for me to take on more areas. But with AGI so close, I decided to spend 100% of my time on teaching AI systems brand new capabilities." The loss of a top AI developer at Amazon comes as the company struggles to keep up in the AI race; even its own employees are reportedly calling its in-house AI products "Amazon Basics." Just a few weeks ago, Amazon rolled out Alexa Plus, its revamped AI assistant, to all users in the US, although some early users have said they'd prefer to stick with the original Alexa. Luan joined Amazon in 2024 along with other employees from his startup, Adept, which was developing AI agent technology that Amazon licensed. While at Amazon, Luan worked on its Nova AI models, including the Nova Act AI agent, which launched as a research preview in March. Act could complete web searches, make purchases, and answer questions, and Amazon said at the time of its launch that Act was already in use in Alexa Plus.

Head of Amazon's AGI lab is leaving the company

Amazon logo on brick office building facade with windows, San Francisco, California, Aug. 29, 2025. The head of Amazon's artificial general intelligence lab is leaving the company less than two years after joining through a so-called acqui-hire deal of his startup Adept. David Luan announced his departure Tuesday in a LinkedIn post, saying he will exit at the end of the week "to cook up something new." Amazon tapped Luan in December 2024 to oversee its newly created AGI lab, based in San Francisco. The lab is focused on "long-term research bets," including developing "useful AI agents." Last year, the group released Amazon's Nova frontier model, which the company hopes will compete with leading AI models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini. "There's incredible work to be done at Amazon and opportunities for me to take on more areas," Luan wrote. "But with AGI so close, I decided to spend 100% of my time on teaching AI systems brand new capabilities." Luan's departure comes after Amazon announced a major reorganization of its AGI division late last year, bringing it under Peter DeSantis, a 27-year veteran of the company and a senior vice president in its cloud unit. Amazon in June 2024 hired Luan and other top executives from Adept. It also licensed technology from Adept, including some of its AI models and datasets. The deal size was not disclosed. Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson in January said his agency would review these AI acqui-hire deals to learn whether tech companies are attempting to evade regulatory reviews. The agency in 2024 opened a probe into Amazon's hiring of Adept employees. AI acqui-hire deals have also come under scrutiny from lawmakers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Amazon representatives declined to comment.

Head of Amazon's AGI lab is leaving in latest exit from high-profile Adept startup deal

David Luan, who led Amazon's San Francisco-based AGI Lab and oversaw one of its most important agentic AI initiatives, is leaving less than two years after joining the tech giant through an acqui-hire deal involving him and other leaders from AI startup Adept. Luan announced his exit Tuesday in a LinkedIn post, saying he will leave at the end of the week "to cook up something new." "There's incredible work to be done at Amazon and opportunities for me to take on more areas. But with AGI so close, I decided to spend 100% of my time on teaching AI systems brand new capabilities," Luan wrote, adding later, "I have a bet for what's next." With his departure, four of the five Adept co-founders who joined Amazon as part of the high-profile 2024 arrangement have left the company, a review of LinkedIn profiles shows. Peter DeSantis, a 27-year Amazon veteran and senior vice president who oversees the company's custom chips and quantum computing efforts, late last year took over the broader organization that includes the AGI team, which is responsible for Amazon's Nova Act AI agent technologies. Luan wrote that the team "will be in great hands" with DeSantis. Adept co-founder Kelsey Szot remains at the company on the AGI team, and Bryan Silverthorn, a director of applied science who also joined Amazon from Adept, continues to lead agent model training research on the AGI team, his Linkedin profile shows. Amazon declined to comment beyond Luan's post. The arrangement between Amazon and Adept is one of several acqui-hire deals that have drawn scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission in recent years amid concerns that tech giants are using the structures to absorb AI startups without triggering formal merger reviews. Under the deal, Amazon hired Luan and other Adept leaders, and licensed the startup's agent technology and AI models, while Adept continued operating independently with its remaining employees. The FTC reportedly examined the Amazon-Adept deal in 2024. At Amazon, Luan served as vice president of Autonomy and led the AGI Lab, which was formally established in December 2024 as a small, focused research group. Its first major release was Nova Act, an AI model and developer toolkit for building agents that can perform tasks autonomously in web browsers, which Amazon unveiled in March 2025. "We really think agents are the last missing piece on the path to general intelligence," Luan told GeekWire in an interview ahead of the Nova Act launch. In his departure post on Tuesday, Luan said Nova Act had been adopted by customers including Hertz, 1Password, and Amazon.com itself, and had reached the top of the REALBench agent research leaderboard. The model became generally available as an AWS service at Amazon's re:Invent conference in December. The other Adept co-founders who left Amazon scattered across the industry. Erich Elsen departed after four months and is now a principal research scientist at Databricks. Augustus Odena and Maxwell Nye both left after about a year and are now research scientists at Meta. Before founding Adept in 2022, Luan ran research and engineering at OpenAI for three years and led Google's large language model effort. In his departure post, he described his career as a series of early bets, including incubating the first GPTs at OpenAI, and going all-in on agents at Adept before others. He said Adept's technology and people "now drive computer-use efforts at every major lab." Amazon has separately invested up to $8 billion in Anthropic and offers third-party AI models alongside its Nova family through AWS, competing against cloud rivals Microsoft, Google, and others.

Amazon AI Lab Head, Nova Act Creator And Former OpenAI Exec Departs

Amazon's artificial general intelligence lab and top agentic AI researcher, David Luan, is leaving the tech giant after less than two years. Luan is the former CEO of Adept AI Labs and a former top OpenAI executive. The head of Amazon's artificial general intelligence (AGI) Lab and agentic AI R&D, David Luan, is departing after less than two years following Amazon hiring Luan and his team from Adept AI Labs. Amazon's AGI Lab recently released Amazon's Nova Act agent, which competes against AI models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude. "As the underdog, seeing Nova Act at the top of agent research leaderboards like REALBench is quite satisfying," said Luan on LinkedIn announcing his departure from Amazon. [Related: Andy Jassy On AWS' $244B Backlog, Trainium4 And AI Chips Strategy] Luan is also the former director of engineering for OpenAI and helped create GPT, the company's blockbuster AI technology "At OpenAI, I was lucky to incubate the first GPTs," Luan said on LinkedIn. Amazon's AGI Lab consists of researchers, engineers, designers and product innovators who focus on building useful AI agents operating across San Francisco and Boston. The group has a focus on long-term AI research innovation. "As a childhood AWS fanboy, it was incredible to speedrun launching our own tier-1 AWS service. We scaled up the agent training recipes we invented at Adept, did new RL research, and put the tech in the hands of AWS customers like Hertz, 1Password and Amazon.com itself," Luan said. "I'll be leaving Amazon at the end of this week to cook up something new," he said. Amazon hired former Adept CEO Luan along with other Adept co-founders including Augustus Odena, Kelsey Szot, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen and other employees in June 2024. "At Adept, we went all-in on agents before anyone else -- our tech/people now drive computer-use efforts at every major lab," Luan said. In addition, Amazon began licensing Adept technology at the time, including AI models and datasets. "Thanks to the Adept deal, I've spent the last ~2 years learning from [Amazon CEO] Andy Jassy, [AWS CEO] Matt Garman, [AWS Senior Vice President] Peter Desantis and [Amazon AI Head Scientist] Rohit Prasad while leading Amazon's agents R&D effort and our San Francisco AI lab," said Luan on LinkedIn. In late 2025, Amazon unveiled a major reorganization of its AGI division to bring it under Amazon and AWS veteran DeSantis. "The team will be in great hands with Peter DeSantis from here," Luan said. Luan was a founding team member and CEO of San Francisco-based Adept AI Labs before joining Amazon. Adept is an AI research and product company specializing in agentic AI models. Prior to Adept, Luan was a director in Google's research division for over a year, leading Google's large language model (LLM) efforts. Before Google, Luan was director of engineering for OpenAI for several years. Other IT executive roles held by Luan over the years include CEO of deep learning company Dextro, as well as director of AI for machine learning research firm Axon. "This wasn't an easy decision, and I'm sad to leave this wonderful team," Luan said. "I'm grateful for the trust our execs placed in me during an important moment for Amazon and the field. I'm excited to swing at the next idea!" Amazon generated total sales of $213 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 14 percent year over year, while the company's operating income increased to $25 billion. The Seattle-based company is now at an $852 billion annual run rate. "With such strong demand for our existing offerings and seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites, we expect to invest about $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026, and anticipate strong long-term return on invested capital," said Amazon CEO Jassy during Amazon's fourth-quarter earnings call.

Amazon Announces Management Changes for AGI lab

Amazon announced that David Luan, Vice President, Agents and Head of the San Francisco artificial intelligence lab, resigned from his position. David Luan joined Amazon in June 2024 after his co-founded startup Adept was acquired by the company. The San Francisco AI lab was created in December 2024 to work on long-term research bets. Among the lab's products include Nova Act agent, unveiled in March 2025, which competes with ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), and Gemini (Google). The AI lab scaled up the agent training recipes invented at Adept, did new RL research, and put the tech in the hands of AWS customers like Hertz, 1Password, and Amazon.com itself. David Luan announced that Peter Desantis, SVP of utility computing products at AWS who has spent 27 years at the company, will take over his role. David Luan holds a certificate in CS from Worcester State from when he was 12, and a BS/BA in Applied Math and Political Science from Yale. Prior to founding Adept in January 2022, Luan ran research and engineering at OpenAI for three years and led Google's large language model effort. His main focus is research, and his career has revolved around near- and long-term impacts of AI on society. He is interested in how the dynamics of AI development can shape outcomes for people, and spends time with ethics, safety, and policy researchers. His departure comes after Amazon announced major reorganisation of its AGI division into its AWS Cloud division last year.

Amazon AI Lab Leader to Depart Amid Leadership Reshuffle

The head of a key Amazon artificial intelligence lab, David Luan, is leaving the company, the latest senior departure amid a reshuffle of the group's AI leadership. Luan, who led Amazon's San Francisco AI Lab, said on Tuesday that he would be leaving at the end of the week to "cook up something new." He oversaw Amazon's AI agentic effort, Nova Act. Agents are AI tools that work by taking some action on behalf of users. Luan joined Amazon's artificial general intelligence organization in 2024 after Adept AI, a startup he co-founded, struck a deal in which the U.S. tech giant agreed to hire some of the startup's employees and pay about $330 million to license its agent technology, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. "There's incredible work to be done at Amazon and opportunities for me to take on more areas. But with AGI so close, I decided to spend 100% of my time on teaching AI systems brand new capabilities," Luan said in a post on LinkedIn. Amazon didn't immediately reply to a request for comment. Amazon has shaken up its AI leadership in recent months. In December, the company announced the departure of Rohit Prasad, who oversaw its artificial general intelligence efforts and was previously the head scientist behind Amazon's Alexa voice assistant. It then appointed Peter DeSantis to oversee a new organization that would drive AI model development, quantum computing and chip making. DeSantis previously led Amazon's infrastructure teams. The technology giant earlier this month unveiled plans for a massive increase in AI-related spending, estimating $200 billion in 2026 capital spending, a nearly 60% increase from last year and far above Wall Street expectations.