Amazon logo on the facade of a brick office building with windows, San Francisco, California, August 29, 2025.
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head of Amazon’s He is leaving the Institute for General Artificial Intelligence less than two years after joining his startup Adept through a so-called acquisition deal.
David Ruan announced his departure in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday, saying he would be leaving the company this weekend “to prepare for something new.”
Amazon appointed Luan in December 2024 to oversee the newly formed San Francisco-based AGI Lab. The institute is focused on “long-term research bets,” including the development of “useful AI agents.” Last year, the group released Amazon’s Nova Act agent, an extension of the Nova model. The company expects it to compete with leading AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Google Gemini.
“Amazon has great work to do and I have the opportunity to work on more areas,” Luan wrote. “But with AGI so close, I decided to spend 100% of my time teaching AI systems completely new capabilities.”
Ruane’s departure comes after Amazon late last year announced a major reorganization of its AGI division, placing it under the leadership of Peter DeSantis, who has been with the company for 27 years and is its senior vice president of cloud. AGI refers to artificial intelligence that can perform at least as well as humans in most tasks.
Amazon hired Luan and other executives from Adept in June 2024. We also licensed technology, including some of our AI models and datasets, from Adept. The size of the transaction was not disclosed.
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in January that the agency would scrutinize these AI acquisition deals to learn whether technology companies are trying to avoid regulatory scrutiny. The agency launched an investigation into Amazon’s hiring of Adept employees in 2024. AI acquisition deals have also come under intense scrutiny from lawmakers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
An Amazon representative declined to comment.
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