Amazon puts end dates on four of its own Nova models — and bets the house on one frontier system

Amazon is winding down most of the Nova family it launched barely eighteen months ago. Its own lifecycle table for Amazon Bedrock now carries end-of-life dates for four Nova models: Nova Premier, the family's largest, and Nova Sonic, its speech model, both stop working on 14 September 2026, while the image model Nova Canvas and the video model Nova Reel follow on 30 September 2026. All four entered the Legacy state in March 2026, which under Amazon's own rules already blocks new customers and new fine-tuning jobs. The strategy behind the dates has been reported rather than announced. Amazon is said to be folding its scattered specialist models — separate systems for text, image, audio and video — into a single frontier-scale model intended to compete directly with OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, with a debut targeted at re:Invent in late 2026 and the Nova name likely retained. The work sits with the Frontier Model Research team that Pieter Abbeel was brought in to lead in December 2025. Amazon has confirmed that Nova 2 Lite stays. What makes this unusual is not the retirement itself but who is doing it. Amazon is the cloud provider hosting everyone else's models, and the same lifecycle page that ends Nova Premier also schedules Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4 for 14 October 2026, Cohere's Command R and Command R+ for 19 August 2026, and AI21's Jamba 1.5 pair for 26 November 2026. A company that sells shelf space has decided it would rather stock one strong own-brand product than five weak ones. For anyone building on Bedrock the practical point is the calendar. Legacy models do not fail politely: after the EOL date requests simply stop working, and Amazon states plainly that migration does not happen automatically.