Amazon winds down most flagship Nova AI models

Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. ↗ 1.94% is overhauling its artificial intelligence strategy, deprecating most of its flagship Nova AI models and redirecting engineering talent toward a new frontier-model effort, according to a Business Insider report published Tuesday.reuters+1

Winding Down Flagship Models

The company has begun winding down its high-end Nova Premier and Omni text models, as well as the Reel video-generation model and Canvas image-generation model, according to people familiar with the matter. Some employees described these models as operating in "KTLO" — short for "keep the lights on" — meaning they remain supported for existing customers but are no longer under active development.africa.businessinsider+1

The remaining Nova portfolio includes the Nova 2 Sonic and Nova 2 Lite foundation models, Nova Forge for building and customizing models, and Nova Act, Amazon's AI agent technology. Resources are shifting toward a new initiative known internally as Frontier Model Research, led by researcher Pieter Abbeel, who joined Amazon through its 2024 acquisition of robotics startup Covariant. A new flagship foundation model is expected to debut at Amazon's re:Invent conference later this year.reuters+2

AGI Layoffs and Service Retirements

The restructuring follows layoffs in Amazon's Artificial General Intelligence organization last week, as reported by Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. The company also shut down AGI Lab, a research group created in 2024 after hiring most of the team behind AI startup Adept.reuters+2

Separately, AWS announced in late June that roughly 20 services and features would move to maintenance mode, including Amazon Kendra, Amazon Q Business, and Amazon Bedrock Agents, now renamed Bedrock Agents Classic. These services stopped accepting new customers as of late July. Kendra customers are being directed to Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, while Q Business gives way to Amazon Quick Suite, and Bedrock Agents Classic hands over to Bedrock AgentCore.forbes

Deepening Partner Reliance

The moves coincide with Amazon's expanding partnerships. In February, OpenAI and Amazon announced a multi-year strategic partnership that included a $50 billion Amazon investment in OpenAI and plans to bring OpenAI's frontier models to Amazon Bedrock. GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4, and Codex are now generally available on the platform. AWS also launched Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI in limited preview.openai+2

SVP Peter DeSantis, who now oversees Amazon's AI efforts, has pursued a more focused strategy than his predecessor, concentrating engineering talent and computing resources on fewer frontier-model initiatives rather than spreading investment across multiple text, image, and video model families.africa.businessinsider