Amazon has cut jobs in parts of its artificial general intelligence (AGI) organisation as the technology giant continues restructuring its workforce while investing heavily in AI development ahead of its second-quarter earnings next week.

The company did not disclose how many employees were affected or which teams bore the brunt of the reductions. In a statement issued after enquiries from Reuters and CNBC, an Amazon spokesperson said the company was "sharpening our focus on the initiatives that matter most for customers" and that this had led to "some difficult decisions, including eliminating some roles within parts of our AGI organisation", while continuing to invest in its most important AI priorities.

The cuts represent the latest in a series of targeted layoffs following Amazon's broader workforce reduction of around 16,000 jobs in January. According to Reuters, employees reporting to Adeeb Shanaa, vice president of artificial general intelligence data services, and Vishal Sharma, vice president of AGI information, said on online forums that their teams had been affected, although the full extent of the job losses remains unclear.

According to CNBC, some of the employees laid off worked on model customisation and post-training, while the AGI unit remains central to Amazon's AI ambitions. The division develops foundation models including the Nova family and oversees work spanning silicon development and quantum computing, as the company seeks to compete with rivals developing increasingly capable AI systems.

The scale of the disruption became clearer as affected employees began posting publicly. Several members of the AGI foundation team said on X that they had been let go, offering a rare glimpse inside teams Amazon declined to detail. Yuxin Tang, an LLM pretraining researcher, wrote that "most members in our MoE pre-training team got impacted today", referring to the mixture-of-experts approach used to train large models efficiently.

Miao Xiong, whose work focused on data curation for pretraining, captured the mood of the day. "My job was deciding which data points matter for pretraining. Turns out I was the one that got filtered out," she wrote, adding that a reminder for the team's weekly project sync still went off at 1pm "for a project that no longer has a team".

The cuts also reached newer hires: Kyle Wong, who worked on computer-use agents, said he was laid off the day after his 23rd birthday, having joined from work on GUI agents at startup Simular and at Apple.

The public posts, many of which attracted hundreds of replies and job offers from rival labs, underline how sought-after such specialists remain even as Amazon trims the teams behind its foundation models.

The restructuring follows significant leadership changes within Amazon's AI business over the past year. Reuters reported that Rohit Prasad, who previously oversaw the AGI group, left the company at the end of 2025, with responsibility transferred to senior vice president Peter DeSantis as part of a broader technology organisation. David Luan, who led Amazon's AGI Lab after joining through the acquisition of AI startup Adept, departed in February.

Peter DeSantis acknowledged in an interview with CNBC last month that Amazon's AI models "haven't been at the very frontier for the very largest, most demanding workloads". He added that the company was working to strengthen its technology and hoped to build one of the "most capable intelligent models out there".

The layoffs come as Amazon continues an aggressive expansion of its AI infrastructure. CNBC reported the company has forecast capital expenditure of $200 billion this year, more than 50 per cent higher than in 2025, while raising tens of billions of dollars in debt to support those investments.

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