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

By Unknown Author|Source: Venturebeat|Read Time: 3 mins|Share

The developer kit offers a platform for creating AI agents capable of web navigation and task completion. It leverages Amazon Nova's technology to provide autonomous functionality. Developers can experiment with building these agents to enhance automation and efficiency. The kit enables innovation in AI-driven web interaction and task execution. By utilizing this technology, programmers can explore new possibilities in AI development.

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

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.

In late 2024, Amazon debuted its own internal foundation model family, Amazon Nova, with text, image, and video generation capabilities. Last month, a new Amazon Alexa voice assistant powered in part by Anthropic’s Claude family of models was introduced. On Monday, the e-commerce and cloud giant’s artificial general intelligence division Amazon AGI announced the release of Amazon Nova Act, an experimental developer kit for building AI agents that can navigate the web and complete tasks autonomously.

A New Approach to AI Agents

Since the rise of large language models (LLMs), most "agent" systems have been limited to responding in natural language or providing 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 often require human supervision and struggle with reliability, 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.

Key Features of Nova Act

The Nova Act SDK provides developers with a framework for constructing web-based automation agents using natural language prompts broken down into clear, manageable steps. Some of the key features of Nova Act include:

  • Incremental execution of smaller, verifiable tasks
  • Automation of repeatable digital tasks
  • Reliable workflows for developers

Benchmark Performance and Reliability

Nova Act emphasizes a building-block approach to achieve reliability. It scored over 90% on internal evaluations of tasks that challenge other models, such as interacting with dropdowns, date pickers, or pop-ups. Amazon also highlighted early results in Nova Act’s ability to generalize beyond standard environments.

Flexibility and Model Lock-in

While Nova Act is accessible to developers globally, it is tightly coupled to Amazon’s in-house Nova foundation models, restricting the use of external LLMs. However, Nova Act is not restricted to AWS environments. Developers can download the SDK and run it locally, in the cloud, or wherever they choose.

Security, Licensing, and Pricing

The Nova Act SDK is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0, as an open-source license. However, the Nova Act model itself, along with its weights and training data, remains proprietary and closed-source. At launch, Nova Act is offered as a free research preview.

Future Plans for Nova Act

The release of Nova Act reflects Amazon’s ambition to make action-oriented AI agents a foundational component of computing. The Nova Act SDK is available now for experimentation and prototyping on Amazon’s website and on Github.


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