Amazon Scales Back Nova AI Models, Pivots Remaining Resources to Robotics

Amazon is gutting its in-house AI labs, placing most of its Nova text, video, and image-generating models into maintenance-only "keep the lights on" status, according to a Bloomberg report. The restructuring follows what insiders describe as a broad failure to make the Nova lineup competitive with flagship models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

Rather than abandoning AI entirely, Amazon is consolidating its remaining resources into a single "frontier-model effort" focused on robotics, led by Pieter Abbeel — whose robotics AI startup Covariant was acquired by Amazon in 2024. The shift comes just a week after Amazon closed an 80-person San Francisco AI research office specializing in artificial general intelligence.