On March 31, 2025, Amazon unveiled Nova Act, an advanced AI agent designed to autonomously operate web browsers and execute a variety of tasks. Accompanying this release is the Nova Act Software Development Kit (SDK), providing developers with the necessary tools to create AI-driven applications utilizing Nova Act’s capabilities.
Developed by Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) laboratory in San Francisco, Nova Act is set to enhance the functionality of the forthcoming Alexa+ upgrade—a generative AI-enhanced iteration of Amazon’s widely used voice assistant. The current release of Nova Act is labeled as a research preview, indicating ongoing development and refinement.
The Nova Act SDK is accessible through Amazon’s newly launched platform, nova.amazon.com, which also serves as a hub for Amazon’s suite of Nova foundation models. This initiative positions Amazon in direct competition with similar AI agent technologies from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. The industry consensus suggests that AI agents capable of navigating the web will significantly augment the utility of existing AI chatbots.
With the Nova Act SDK, developers can automate tasks such as placing food orders or making reservations. The toolkit enables AI agents to interact with web pages, complete forms, and select dates on calendars, streamlining user experiences.
Amazon reports that Nova Act has demonstrated superior performance compared to counterparts from OpenAI and Anthropic in internal evaluations. For instance, in the ScreenSpot Web Text assessment—which measures an AI agent’s proficiency in interacting with on-screen text—Nova Act achieved a score of 94%, surpassing OpenAI’s CUA at 88% and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet at 90%. However, it’s important to note that Amazon has not yet benchmarked Nova Act against more widely recognized evaluations like WebVoyager.
This release marks the first public product from Amazon’s AGI lab, an initiative co-led by former OpenAI researchers David Luan and Pieter Abbeel. Both Luan and Abbeel bring extensive experience from their previous ventures—Luan with Adept and Abbeel with Covariant—before joining Amazon to spearhead its AI agent development efforts.
David Luan envisions AI agents as a pivotal step toward achieving superintelligent AI systems. He defines Artificial General Intelligence as an AI system that can help you do anything a human does on a computer. The Nova Act SDK is designed to reliably automate concise, straightforward tasks while allowing developers to specify points within workflows where human intervention is necessary, thereby enhancing the reliability of AI-driven applications.
As Amazon enters the competitive landscape of generalist AI agents, the introduction of Nova Act underscores the company’s commitment to advancing AI technologies that can seamlessly integrate into and enhance daily digital interactions.
