Amazon’s head of AI Lab David Luan exits, shares LinkedIn post

David Luan, head of Amazon AI Lab has announced that he is leaving the e-commerce giant at the end of this week. In a post on LinkedIn, Luan said that the departure comes two-years after joining through an acqui-hire deal of his startup Adept.

“Thanks to the Adept deal, I’ve spent the last ~2 years learning from Andy Jassy, Peter Desantis, Matt Garman, and Rohit Prasad while leading Amazon’s agents R&D effort and our San Francisco AI lab,” he wrote in the post. To recall, Amazon hired Adept CEO David Luan along with other co-founders Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen and Kelsey Szot, and other employees in June 2024. The lab focuses on “long-term research bets,” including developing “useful AI agents.” In 2025, the group released Amazon’s Nova Act agent, an extension of its Nova models – company’s rival to leading AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini.

Read David Luan’s LinkedIn post

I’ll be leaving Amazon at the end of this week to cook up something new.Thanks to the Adept deal, I’ve spent the last ~2 years learning from Andy Jassy, Peter Desantis, Matt Garman, and Rohit Prasad while leading Amazon’s agents R&D effort and our San Francisco AI lab. 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. As the underdog, seeing Nova Act at the top of agent research leaderboards like REALBench is quite satisfying. The team will be in great hands with Peter Desantis from here.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. At OpenAI, I was lucky to incubate the first GPTs; at Adept, we went all-in on agents before anyone else–our tech/people now drive computer-use efforts at every major lab. I have a bet for what's next. ;)This wasn't an easy decision, and I'm sad to leave this wonderful team. 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!