The shelved models stay up for existing customers on what staff call keep-the-lights-on status, and a new flagship is expected at re:Invent this year.

Amazon is retiring most of the flagship Nova models it built itself as it restructures teams and aims engineers at a fresh plan for competing at AI's cutting edge, people with knowledge of the matter told Business Insider. On the way out: the top-tier Premier and Omni versions, the video generator Reel and the image generator Canvas.

Retirement here does not mean shutdown. Several Amazon staffers said the shelved flagship models have moved into what workers there call KTLO status — the letters stand for keep the lights on, engineers' shorthand for software that is still supported for existing customers but no longer ranks as a major development priority.

The funding and staffing steadily pulled off the current Nova models have gone into a fresh effort to build a frontier model, known internally as Frontier Model Research, or FMR. It is headed by the researcher Pieter Abbeel, who came to Amazon when it bought the AI robotics startup Covariant. FMR became a top company priority this year, and among its projects is a new flagship foundation model expected to debut at the company's re:Invent conference this year, a gathering usually held in the autumn. At last year's re:Invent, AWS introduced Nova Omni 2 and presented it as its leading multimodal reasoning model.

The reshuffle comes after job cuts last week in Amazon's Artificial General Intelligence unit and the closure of AGI Lab, a research team the company stood up in 2024 once it brought aboard most of the staff from the AI startup Adept. People with knowledge of the matter said those cuts came as a shock to many employees, since researchers working on frontier models had for years ranked among the technical people Amazon valued most.

The narrowing traces back to a December restructuring that moved the wider AGI unit under Peter DeSantis, a senior vice president, and merged it with the groups handling chip development and quantum computing. Rohit Prasad, a longtime Alexa executive who ran the AGI unit until he left in December 2025, kept several model families going across text, image and video generation. People familiar with the matter said DeSantis has funneled engineers and computing capacity into fewer frontier-model projects.

A spokesperson said AI models remain among the company's highest priorities, that this has not changed, and that Amazon still intends to invest in frontier models. The company has a long record of keeping models running in production for lengthy stretches because customers rely on them, the spokesperson said, and, as happens with any AI portfolio, it keeps adjusting which models it offers according to customer needs, always giving customers clear direction and routes for migrating as models progress.

None of this necessarily means Amazon is abandoning Nova altogether: the Nova 2 Sonic and Nova 2 Lite foundation models remain in the range, along with Nova Forge, which customers use to build and tailor models, and Nova Act, Amazon's agent technology. The model being developed under FMR could still emerge under the Nova brand. Staff say they have had little guidance about where Nova models stand over the long run, which has left uncertainty widespread in the unit.

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