Amazon.com Inc. today introduced Nova Act, a new artificial intelligence agent that can take control of web browsers and take independent actions.

The new AI agent is a research preview built by Amazon’s newly opened Amazon AGI San Francisco Lab, which was behind the release of the Amazon Nova foundation models in December. Amazon Nova launched with three text-generating models — Micro, Lite and Pro — capable of summarizing text, answering questions and understanding context. The company also released two models capable of producing images and generating videos from text and image inputs named Canvas and Reel respectively.

The company said it was also expanding access to Amazon Nova by rolling out a new website, nova.amazon.com, where developers and enthusiasts can explore the foundation models.

“[We’ve put] the power of Amazon’s frontier intelligence into the hands of every developer and tech enthusiast, making it easier than ever to explore the capabilities of Amazon Nova,” said Rohit Prasad, senior vice president of Amazon artificial general intelligence.

Amazon Act is capable of completing rudimentary tasks in a web browser on behalf of a user, such as clicking buttons and entering text into fields. Accompanying the release of the AI agent, Amazon also expanded access to a Nova Act software development kit, or SDK, that will allow developers to build agents that can break down complex commands into a series of actions that can be completed to reach a goal using a mapping such as “Find me the easiest way from my house to visit these three stores and then take in a movie at around 6 pm.”

Amazon said that it is looking to teach its AI agents to “have the same intuitions about UI elements” that humans do. That means interacting with web pages the same way that people do and being able to understand icons, forms, web elements and everything else to participate similarly to another person when asking a question or proposing a task, such as the one above.

Amazon’s move comes at a time when other large enterprise companies have been working on building their own agentic AI solutions, such as Google LLC, OpenAI and Anthropic PBC, which are becoming increasingly powerful. Anthropic unveiled an experimental version of its AI model Claude in October that could use computer interfaces, including web browsers, and Google revealed it was testing a browser control capability for its Gemini flagship AI model in December.

“We’ve created this experience to inspire builders so they can quickly test their ideas with Nova models, and then implement them at scale in Amazon Bedrock,” added Prasad.

Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed Amazon Web Service Inc. service that provides access to cloud-hosted frontier AI models from the company and other providers and tools for building AI applications. Developers can sign up to download the Nova Act SDK or test out the different Nova models on nova.amazon.com starting today.

Photo: Amazon