Amazon raised the competitive profile of its foundation models and added services for custom model training and an agent platform for browser automation.
What’s new: The Nova 2 family of models covers multimodal reasoning, multimodal generation, and speech to speech. Early access to top-of-the-line Nova 2 Pro Preview (multimodal in, text out) and Nova 2 Omni Preview (multimodal in and out) are available via new Nova Forge ($100,000 annually), a new service that offers pre-trained, mid-trained, and post-trained Nova checkpoints, enabling customers to mix proprietary data with Amazon’s datasets. In addition, Amazon launched Nova Act, a service for building browser-automation agents that can navigate websites, fill out forms, extract data, and interact with the web via natural language or Python code. (Disclosure: Andrew Ng serves on Amazon’s board of directors.)
Nova 2 Pro Preview: The latest flagship Nova model, Nova 2 Pro Preview rivals models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI on selected benchmarks.
- Input/output: Text, images, video, speech in (up to 1 million tokens), text out.
- Features: Adjustable reasoning levels (low, medium, high), code interpreter via API that runs and evaluates Python code within the same workflow, web grounding via API that retrieves publicly available information with citations, offered as teacher for model distillation via Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation
- Performance: In Amazon’s tests, Nova 2 Pro Preview performed equal to or better than Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 on 10 of 16 benchmarks, equal to or better than Google Gemini 3 Pro Preview on 8 of 16 benchmarks, equal to or better than OpenAI GPT-5.1 on 8 of 18 benchmarks. On Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index, a weighted average of 10 benchmarks, Nova 2 Pro Preview set to medium reasoning (62) and without reasoning (42) outperformed the earlier Nova Premier (32) but fell short of current leader Gemini 3 Pro Preview (73). On the 𝜏²-Bench Telecom test of agentic behavior, Nova 2 Pro Preview (93 percent) tied for first place with with Grok 4.1 Fast and Kimi K2 Thinking. On the IFBench test of following instructions, Nova 2 Pro Preview (79 percent outperformed GPT 5.1 set to high reasoning (73 percent) and MiniMax-M2 (72 percent). Artificial Analysis has not yet tested Nova 2 Pro Preview on high reasoning.
- Price: $1.25/$0.31/$10 per million input/cached/output tokens via Amazon Nova Forge
Nova 2 Lite: The lightweight Nova 2 Lite is designed to be a fast, cost-effective reasoning model. Performance is equivalent to or better than that of Anthropic Claude Haiku 4.5, Google Gemini Flash 2.5, and OpenAI GPT-5 Mini on most benchmarks tested. $0.3/$0.03/$2.50 per million input/cached/output tokens via Amazon Bedrock.
Nova 2 Omni Preview: Nova 2 Omni Preview is the only widely available reasoning model that natively takes in text, images, video, and speech (up to 1 million tokens, text in over 200 languages, speech in 10 languages) and generates text and images. $0.30/$0.03 per million input/cached text, image, and video tokens; $1.00/$0.10 per million input/cached audio tokens; $2.50/$40 per million output text/image tokens via Amazon Nova Forge.
Nova 2 Sonic: The speech-to-speech model Nova 2 Sonic is multilingual in 7 languages and calls tools without interrupting conversation. In Amazon’s tests, users preferred Nova 2 Sonic to GPT Realtime and Gemini 2.5 Flash in most of its 7 languages. $3/$12 per million input/output speech tokens, $0.33/$2.75 per million input/output text tokens via Amazon Bedrock. The model integrates with Amazon Connect and third-party telephony providers including AudioCodes, Twilio, and Vonage.
Why it matters: The Nova 2 family fills a gap in Amazon’s model portfolio. Until now, the company lacked reasoning models with adjustable thinking levels that would compete with offerings from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. In addition, Nova Forge is exciting and significantly different from offerings by Amazon’s AI competitors, and browser automation via Nova Act is a powerful addition to Amazon Bedrock’s agentic capabilities.
We’re thinking: Amazon’s foundation models have lagged behind those of competitors. Nova 2’s higher performance relative to its predecessors suggests that Amazon is serious about closing the gap.