Key takeaways
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is stepping back into an executive leadership position as co-chief executive of a secretive artificial intelligence startup called Project Prometheus, The New York Times reported on Monday, citing three people familiar with the company.
The venture represents Bezos's first formal operational role since he handed over Amazon's reins to Andy Jassy in July 2021.
While Bezos holds the title of founder at his space company Blue Origin, the Project Prometheus position marks a return to hands-on company management for the world's third-richest person.
The startup is launching with substantial financial backing. Project Prometheus has raised $6.2 billion in funding, with part of that sum coming from Bezos himself, positioning it among the most well-capitalized early-stage AI companies globally.
This funding level places it alongside other recent AI megadeals, including ventures from former OpenAI executives.
Leadership and talent acquisition
Bezos will share the co-CEO title with Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who previously worked closely with Google co-founder Sergey Brin at Google X, the research division often called "The Moonshot Factory."
Bajaj's work at Google X contributed to projects including Wing, a drone delivery service, and the self-driving car technology that became Waymo.
Bajaj also co-founded Verily, a life sciences company owned by Alphabet, and most recently led Foresite Labs, an AI and data science incubator affiliated with investment firm Foresite Capital.
He departed Foresite Labs to focus on Project Prometheus, according to reports. His LinkedIn profile lists the new company's locations as San Francisco, London, and Zurich.
Project Prometheus has already hired nearly 100 employees, with a significant portion recruited from leading AI laboratories, including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta.
The aggressive talent acquisition signals the startup's ambition to compete at the highest levels of AI research and development.
Focus on the physical economy
The company describes itself on LinkedIn simply as working on "AI for the physical economy."
According to The New York Times, Project Prometheus will focus on building AI systems that learn from observations and interactions with the physical world, rather than solely processing digital information like conventional chatbots.
The startup plans to apply AI to engineering and manufacturing across multiple sectors, including computers, automobiles, and aerospace.
This final category aligns closely with Bezos's existing interests through Blue Origin, whose New Glenn rocket recently completed a successful second flight.
Project Prometheus represents part of a broader trend of companies seeking to apply AI to physical tasks and scientific research.
The startup's approach reportedly resembles that of Periodic Labs, which is developing technology to accelerate scientific discoveries by simulating physical world conditions to train AI models.
Bezos's views on AI and the investment climate
Bezos has been increasingly vocal about his views on artificial intelligence, even while acknowledging concerns about overinvestment in the sector.
Speaking at Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin in October, he characterized the current environment as "a kind of industrial bubble."
"When people get very excited, as they are today, about artificial intelligence, for example, every experiment gets funded, every company gets funded. The good ideas and the bad ideas," Bezos said at the conference, according to CNBC.
Despite these concerns, Bezos maintained that the underlying technology is transformative. "That doesn't mean anything that is happening isn't real. AI is real, and it is going to change every industry," he told the audience.
He also expressed optimism about AI's potential benefits for society, stating that "the benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic" and that "civilizational abundance comes from our inventions."
At the same event, Bezos said he was far from slowing down. "I am working very hard on Blue Origin. I'm working very hard on AI. I'm the least retired person in the world, and I will never retire because work is too much fun," he said.
The launch of Project Prometheus places Bezos in direct competition with other technology billionaires who have been rapidly expanding their AI investments.
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