Amazon’s head of one of its key artificial intelligence labs, David Luan, is leaving the company after two years, as the group continues to overhaul its AI leadership.
Luan said he would depart at the end of the week to “cook up something new”. He oversaw Amazon’s agentic AI service, Nova Act, which can autonomously perform tasks in a web browser.
In a LinkedIn post, Luan said that while there were opportunities to take on additional responsibilities at Amazon, the proximity of artificial general intelligence led him to focus full-time on developing new AI capabilities.
Luan previously led engineering at OpenAI and joined Amazon in 2024 alongside several senior hires from Adept, the start-up he co-founded.
Amazon has reshaped its AI leadership in recent months as it seeks to close the gap with rivals in advanced chips and large language models. Former AI head Rohit Prasad departed in December, with Peter DeSantis, previously head of data centre engineering, taking oversight of AI model development, custom chips and quantum computing.
Amazon’s AGI lab in San Francisco, employing about 100 people, will continue to report to DeSantis. The group’s frontier model development remains separate under Pieter Abbeel, who leads work on the Nova family of models.
Despite heavy investment in AI data centres, internal concerns persist that Amazon did not fully capitalise on its cloud market leadership at the start of the AI boom.
