Amazon unveils Nova Act, an AI agent that can control a web browser

Summary

Amazon on Monday unveiled Nova Act, a general-purpose AI agent that can take control of a web browser and independently perform some simple actions. Alongside the new agentic AI model, Amazon is releasing the Nova Act SDK, a toolkit that allows developers to build agent prototypes with Nova Act. Nova Act, developed by Amazon’s recently opened San Francisco-based AGI lab, will also power key features of the company’s upcoming Alexa+ upgrade, a generative AI-enhanced version of Amazon’s popular voice assistant. The version of Nova Act available starting today is a little less polished, however. Amazon is calling it a research preview. Developers can access the Nova Act toolkit on a new website, nova.amazon.com, which also serves as a showcase for Amazon’s various Nova foundation models. Nova Act is Amazon’s attempt to take on OpenAI’s Operator and Anthropic’s Computer Use with general-purpose AI agent technology of its own. Several leading tech companies believe AI agents that can navigate the web for users will make today’s AI chatbots significantly more useful. Amazon may not be the first to develop this sort of agentic technology, but via Alexa+, it may have the widest reach. Amazon says developers building with the Nova Act SDK should be able to automate basic actions on behalf of users, such as ordering salads from Sweetgreen or making dinner reservations. With the Nova Act toolkit, developers can pull together tools that allow an AI agent to navigate web pages, fill out forms, or pick dates on a calendar. Amazon claims that Nova Act outperforms agents from OpenAI and Anthropic on several of the company’s internal tests. For example, on ScreenSpot Web Text, which measures how an AI agent interacts with text on a screen, Nova Act scored 94%, outperforming OpenAI’s CUA (which scored 88%) and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet (90%). However, Amazon didn’t benchmark Nova Act using more common agent evaluations, such as WebVoyager. Nova Act is the first public product to ...