Amazon hires Adept AI's founders and licenses its technology

Amazon hired David Luan, co-founder and chief executive of AI-agent startup Adept, along with its other four co-founders and additional staff, and separately licensed Adept’s technology — its multimodal foundation models and agent-automation systems built for controlling software interfaces. Luan joined Amazon’s newly formed AGI team, reporting to Rohit Prasad, who led the company’s large-language-model efforts.

Rather than an outright acquisition, the arrangement left Adept operating as an independent company under a new chief executive, refocused on narrower agentic-AI products — a structure that mirrored Microsoft’s deal with Inflection AI four months earlier, in which Microsoft hired most of Inflection’s staff and licensed its models while Inflection continued as a smaller separate entity. Reporting on the deal noted that regulators had grown more attentive to this “acquihire” pattern, which let large companies absorb a start-up’s talent and technology without the merger review a formal acquisition would trigger, though no specific enforcement action against the Amazon deal was reported at the time.

The hire gave Amazon’s AGI group direct experience in building autonomous software agents, a capability area it had lagged OpenAI, Google and Anthropic in developing in-house, and set up a research direction Amazon expanded later that year with a dedicated agent-focused lab.