Amazon has shut down its Blue Jay warehouse robotics project less than six months after unveiling the technology, a significant setback for the company known for its large commercial robotics program.
Blue Jay was introduced in October last year as a multi-armed robot designed to sort and move packages in Amazon’s same-day delivery facilities. At the time of its announcement, Amazon said the robot had been developed in roughly a year, a notably short timeline credited to advances in AI. The robot was being tested at a facility in South Carolina.
Amazon spokesperson Terrence Clark confirmed the halt to the press, framing Blue Jay as a prototype from the outset, a characterization not made clear in the company’s original press materials. “We’re always experimenting with new ways to improve the customer experience and make work safer, more efficient, and more engaging for our employees,” Clark said. Employees who worked on Blue Jay are being moved to other teams, and the company says the core technology developed for the project will carry over into other robotics initiatives.
According to Amazon’s operations news blog, the development of Blue Jay leaned heavily on agentic AI to accelerate design and testing. Amazon maintains that the underlying technology remains valuable even as the specific product is discontinued, describing it as an acceleration of existing “manipulation programs.”
The cancellation comes as Amazon continues to scale its broader robotics footprint. The company also deployed the Vulcan robot last year, a two-armed system capable of sensing the objects it handles, used in the storage compartments of Amazon’s fulfillment centers. Amazon reached a milestone of 1 million robots deployed across its warehouses last July.
Amazon’s robotics program traces back to its 2012 acquisition of Kiva Systems, whose warehouse automation technology became the foundation of the company’s fulfillment operations. Autonomous systems continue to expand across industries, and Amazon’s willingness to cancel Blue Jay suggests the company is comfortable terminating specific experiments even as its overall automation investment grows. The Blue Jay episode illustrates the gap that can exist between an AI-accelerated prototype and a production-ready system built to operate at Amazon’s scale.
