AIBRIEF
Engineering and compute go to a new frontier research team led by Pieter Abbeel, leaving the voice focused Nova 2 Sonic, lightweight Nova 2 Lite, the Nova Forge custom model builder, and the agentic Nova Act as the actively developed lineup.
Amazon is moving four of its Nova foundation models into keep-the-lights-on maintenance, per a Memeburn write-up of Business Insider's scoop. Nova Premier, Nova Omni, Nova Reel, and Nova Canvas will get bug fixes and security patches only, with engineering and compute routed to a new Frontier Model Research team inside Amazon's AGI organization, Business Insider reports.
The new team is led by AI researcher and Covariant co-founder Pieter Abbeel. For AWS Bedrock customers, four Nova models stay under active development: Nova 2 Sonic, Nova 2 Lite, Nova Forge (a custom-model builder), and Nova Act (an agentic assistant). The four shelved models covered Amazon's top text model (Premier), multimodal input (Omni), video (Reel), and image generation (Canvas), with a reported migration path for existing users.
The reshuffle follows the December 2025 departure of AGI chief Rohit Prasad and Amazon's July 2026 closure of its San Francisco AI lab, originally built around the 2024 Adept acquisition. The first model from the new frontier team is expected around AWS re:Invent in late 2026, per The Decoder's re-reporting.
Amazon's reporting came through sources inside the company rather than on the record. The four retired models accounted for most of Amazon's flagship Nova lineup, leaving a narrower set for Bedrock customers planning work over the next year.