Amazon Tries to Move Beyond AI Basics

After nearly three years of building its own version of cutting-edge large language models, Amazon has come up with models that offer a reliable, cheap alternative to the flashiest ones made by rivals but don’t fully replace them.

That’s true even in Amazon’s own products: Amazon’s Rufus shopping assistant uses a mix of its in-house Nova models and those developed by Anthropic. Kiro, a vibe-coding product Amazon released in the mid-2025, uses models including Anthropic, but currently not Nova. That reliance on other companies’ models is worrying some Amazon insiders.