Head of Amazon’s AGI lab is leaving the company
Amazon logo on the facade of a brick office building with windows, San Francisco, California, August 29, 2025.
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President Amazon’s artificial general intelligence lab is leaving the company less than two years after joining its new venture Adept via a so-called acquisition deal.
David Luan announced his departure on Tuesday a LinkedIn postHe said he would be leaving at the end of the week “to cook something new.”
Amazon enlisted Luan in December 2024 to oversee its newly created company AGI laboratoryBased in San Francisco. The lab is focusing on “long-term research bets,” including developing “useful artificial intelligence agents.” Last year, the group launched Amazon’s Nova Act agent, an extension of its Nova models, and the company hopes it will compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and leading AI models. Google’s Gemini.
“There is incredible work to be done at Amazon, and there are opportunities for me to take on more roles,” Luan wrote. “But with AGI so close, I decided to spend 100% of my time teaching AI systems brand new capabilities.”
Luan’s departure comes after Amazon announced a major restructuring of its AGI division late last year, placing it under the management of Peter DeSantis, a 27-year veteran of the company and senior vice president of its cloud unit. AGI refers to artificial intelligence that can perform as well as or better than humans on most tasks.
Amazon hired Luan and other senior executives from Adept in June 2024. It also licensed technology from Adept, including some AI models and datasets. The size of the deal was not disclosed.
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in January that his agency would examine these AI purchase deals to find out whether tech companies were trying to evade regulatory scrutiny. The agency opened an investigation into Amazon’s hiring of Adept employees in 2024. AI purchase deals have also come under scrutiny from lawmakers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
Amazon representatives declined to comment.
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