Project Prometheus, the new AI venture involving Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, has quietly absorbed a small but notable player in agentic AI. Corporate filings obtained by WIRED show that General Agents, a San Francisco startup focused on computer agents, was acquired after an off-the-record AI dinner in early June.
The move adds another clue to what Prometheus may be building: AI systems that do more than generate text or images, and instead help operate tools, workflows, and potentially manufacturing processes.
A quiet deal after an AI dinner
In early June, tech entrepreneur Vik Bajaj hosted an off-the-record dinner at Saison, a two-Michelin-star restaurant in San Francisco. The gathering brought together journalists and a handful of scientists for a conversation about AI.
One attendee was Sherjil Ozair, who had previously held senior research roles at DeepMind and Tesla. According to public records cited by WIRED, Bajaj and Ozair were moving toward a deal the next day.
Bajaj had already begun working earlier this year with Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos on Project Prometheus. The venture is backed by $6.2 billion in funding, including from Bezos, according to two people familiar with the startup who were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
Project Prometheus is working on AI systems that can support the manufacturing of computers, cars, and even spacecraft, those people said. The startup has brought on over 100 employees, including Ozair and several people from General Agents.
What the filings show
Corporate filings in Delaware obtained by WIRED show that Bajaj formed an entity to acquire General Agents the morning after the San Francisco dinner. Four days later, that entity merged with Ozair’s startup.
The terms of the acquisition could not be learned. The filings list General Agents’ new address as the San Francisco headquarters of Foresite Labs, a biotech incubator led by Bajaj.
Bajaj previously cofounded Alphabet’s health sciences company Verily. He and Bezos have also been connected through Bezos’ investments in biotech companies Bajaj helped start or run, including Grail and Xaira Therapeutics, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Bajaj and Ozair did not respond to requests for comment. Mythos Ventures, which had invested in General Agents before the acquisition, declined to comment. Foresite Labs, which hosted the June dinner, also declined to comment.
Why General Agents matters
General Agents was established last year by Ozair. The startup released its first technology this past April: Ace, described as “a real-time computer pilot.”
Ace is part of a category the AI industry calls computer agents. These tools can take control of a computer and perform actions based on a user’s prompts, moving across different apps to complete ordinary laptop tasks.
One launch demo showed Ace downloading an image from Google and sending it to someone over iMessage in under 15 seconds. That speed appears to be one reason General Agents drew attention.
How Ace connects to Prometheus’ broader work is still unclear. New versions of Ace continue to be released as recently as this month, according to public data from General Agents. The company’s website and job postings remain online.
The leader of a team in India helping train Ace also joined Prometheus, according to their LinkedIn profile.
The talent picture is taking shape
Last week, The New York Times revealed the first details about Prometheus, including that Bezos and Bajaj will serve as co-CEOs. WIRED reported that the General Agents acquisition had not previously been reported.
After The New York Times story appeared, Guss, Ozair, and about three dozen other people updated their LinkedIn profiles to show an affiliation with the Bezos venture. Several of those people also work at Foresite Labs.
Two days after the acquisition, General Agents cofounder and former OpenAI research scientist William Guss posted on social media asking for introductions to people working in US manufacturing. He wrote, “I’d love to talk really trying to understand the space and see some factories :)”
Other researchers have also surfaced around the project. At least two other featured guests at the June dinner, including former Nvidia senior research scientist Kamyar Azizzadenesheli, quietly joined Prometheus early this year, according to updated LinkedIn profiles.
Ashish Vaswani and Jakob Uszkoreit, two former Google researchers who coauthored a famous AI paper, were unable to attend the dinner. Both are now founding advisers to Prometheus while running their own startups, according to LinkedIn data and a person familiar with the matter.
None of the researchers responded to requests for comment.
What remains unknown
Despite the funding, hiring, and acquisition, major facts about Project Prometheus remain limited. Its founding date, formal name, and headquarters have not been publicly identified.
The General Agents deal raises a practical question: whether Prometheus wants Ace itself, the team behind it, or both. The source material does not answer that question, but it does show Prometheus bringing agentic AI talent into a venture aimed at manufacturing.
Harsha Abegunasekara, cofounder and CEO of Donely, which makes a competitor to Ace, said he learned about the General Agents acquisition from an investor in Ozair’s startup. For Donely, the deal has created mixed reactions: some potential investors are pleased that a respected rival may be off the board, while others worry about competing with Bezos if Ace becomes central to Prometheus.
“There is something important there for Prometheus to get the entire company,” Abegunasekara says. “What General Agents really cracked early on is speed—Ace runs on your computer at light speed. We’ve been working on that for six months and haven’t achieved it yet.”
For now, Project Prometheus remains partly hidden from public view. But the acquisition of General Agents points to a clear area of interest: AI that can act quickly on computers, not just answer questions about them.