Amazon is closing its San Francisco AGI site as part of the layoffs it made this week in its artificial general intelligence organization, but said its frontier model research lab will continue.
A company spokesperson confirmed the news of the site closure, which was first reported by The Information. Amazon’s frontier model research work will carry on under Pieter Abbeel, a UC Berkeley professor who joined Amazon in 2024 when the company licensed the technology and hired the team from Covariant, the robotics startup he co-founded.
The AGI Lab was founded in December 2024 and initially built around several dozen employees Amazon brought in from the startup Adept, including its co-founder and CEO David Luan.
The team grew to about 80 people at its peak, according to The Information, but more than a dozen of the Adept hires have since left, Luan among them. Earlier this week, Amazon confirmed it was cutting an unspecified number of jobs across the broader AGI organization.
Impacted employees will have the chance to explore other roles at Amazon, the spokesperson said, and the company is supporting them through that process.
Nova Act, the browser-agent model and service that came out of the group, remains available on AWS and in use by customers. More broadly, AWS has continued to build out its agentic AI lineup, including Bedrock AgentCore and applications like Kiro, Quick, Continuum and Transform.
The moves come as Amazon invests heavily in helping customers deploy AI, including a $1 billion AWS effort to embed engineers with businesses building AI agents. The initiative reflects an expanded industry focus toward putting agents and models to better use for customers.
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