David Luan, who led Amazon’s San Francisco-based AGI Lab and oversaw one of its most important agentic AI initiatives, is leaving less than two years after joining the tech giant through an acqui-hire deal involving him and other leaders from AI startup Adept.
Luan announced his exit Tuesday in a LinkedIn post, saying he will leave at the end of the week “to cook up something new.”
“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,” Luan wrote, adding later, “I have a bet for what’s next.”
With his departure, four of the five Adept co-founders who joined Amazon as part of the high-profile 2024 arrangement have left the company, a review of LinkedIn profiles shows.
Peter DeSantis, a 27-year Amazon veteran and senior vice president who oversees the company’s custom chips and quantum computing efforts, late last year took over the broader organization that includes the AGI team, which is responsible for Amazon’s Nova Act AI agent technologies. Luan wrote that the team “will be in great hands” with DeSantis.
Adept co-founder Kelsey Szot remains at the company on the AGI team, and Bryan Silverthorn, a director of applied science who also joined Amazon from Adept, continues to lead agent model training research on the AGI team, his Linkedin profile shows.
Amazon declined to comment beyond Luan’s post.
The arrangement between Amazon and Adept is one of several acqui-hire deals that have drawn scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission in recent years amid concerns that tech giants are using the structures to absorb AI startups without triggering formal merger reviews.
Under the deal, Amazon hired Luan and other Adept leaders, and licensed the startup’s agent technology and AI models, while Adept continued operating independently with its remaining employees. The FTC reportedly examined the Amazon-Adept deal in 2024.
At Amazon, Luan served as vice president of Autonomy and led the AGI Lab, which was formally established in December 2024 as a small, focused research group. Its first major release was Nova Act, an AI model and developer toolkit for building agents that can perform tasks autonomously in web browsers, which Amazon unveiled in March 2025.
“We really think agents are the last missing piece on the path to general intelligence,” Luan told GeekWire in an interview ahead of the Nova Act launch.
In his departure post on Tuesday, Luan said Nova Act had been adopted by customers including Hertz, 1Password, and Amazon.com itself, and had reached the top of the REALBench agent research leaderboard. The model became generally available as an AWS service at Amazon’s re:Invent conference in December.
The other Adept co-founders who left Amazon scattered across the industry. Erich Elsen departed after four months and is now a principal research scientist at Databricks. Augustus Odena and Maxwell Nye both left after about a year and are now research scientists at Meta.
Before founding Adept in 2022, Luan ran research and engineering at OpenAI for three years and led Google’s large language model effort. In his departure post, he described his career as a series of early bets, including incubating the first GPTs at OpenAI, and going all-in on agents at Adept before others.
He said Adept’s technology and people “now drive computer-use efforts at every major lab.”
Amazon has separately invested up to $8 billion in Anthropic and offers third-party AI models alongside its Nova family through AWS, competing against cloud rivals Microsoft, Google, and others.
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