The sleeping giant has awoken! For a while, it seemed like Amazon was playing catchup in the race to offer its users — particularly the millions of developers building atop Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s cloud infrastructure — compelling first-party AI models and tools. But in 2024, it debuted its own internal foundation model family, Amazon Nova, with text, image and even video generation capabilities, and last month saw a new Amazon Alexa voice assistant powered in part by Anthropic’s Claude family of models. Then, on Monday, the e-commerce and cloud giant’s artificial general intelligence division Amazon AGI has announced the release of Amazon Nova Act, an experimental developer kit for building AI agents that can navigate the web and complete tasks autonomously, powered by a custom, proprietary version of Amazon’s Nova large language model (LLM). Oh, and the standard developer kit (SDK) is open source under a permissive Apache 2.0 license, though the SDK is designed to work only with Amazon’s in-house custom Nova model, not any third-party ones. The goal is to enable third-party developers to build AI agents capable of reliably performing tasks within web browsers. But how does Amazon’s Nova Act stack up to other agent building platforms out there on the market, such as Microsoft’s AutoGen, Salesforce’s Agentforce, and of course, OpenAI’s recently released open source Agents SDK? Since the public rise of large language models (LLMs), most ‘agent’ systems have been limited to responding in natural language or querying information by querying knowledge bases. Nova Act is part of the larger industry shift toward action-based agents—systems that can complete actual tasks across digital environments on behalf of the user. Amazon AGI emphasizes that current agent systems, while promising, struggle with reliability and often require human supervision, especially when handling multi-step or complex workflows. Nova Act is specifically designed to address these limitations by providing a set of atomic, prescriptive commands that can be chained together into reliable workflows.

What you need to know about Amazon Nova Act: the new AI agent SDK challenging OpenAI, Microsoft, Salesforce

Amazon AGI has announced the release of Amazon Nova Act, an experimental developer kit for building AI agents that can navigate the web and complete tasks autonomously. Powered by a custom, proprietary version of Amazon’s Nova large language model (LLM), this SDK is designed to enable third-party developers to build reliable AI agents capable of performing tasks within web browsers. The SDK is open source under the permissive Apache 2.0 license and is intended to compete with other platforms like Microsoft’s AutoGen, Salesforce’s Agentforce, and OpenAI’s Agents SDK.