Peter DeSantis, Amazon's SVP of Foundational AI Models, Custom Silicon, and Quantum Computing
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Amazon is winding down most of its Nova in-house AI models.
Amazon's AGI team was hit by layoffs.
SVP Peter DeSantis wants to narrow the company's AI strategy.
Amazon is overhauling its AI strategy, winding down many in-house models, reorganizing teams, and focusing engineers on a new strategy to compete at the frontier, according to people familiar with the matter.
The changes follow layoffs in Amazon's Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, organization last week and the shutdown of AGI Lab, a research group it created in 2024 after hiring most of the team behind AI startup Adept.
The restructuring suggests Amazon is refocusing its AI strategy. Rather than investing across a number of text, image, and video models, the company is concentrating engineering talent and scarce computing resources on its highest priorities.
"KTLO"
Amazon has begun deprecating most of its in-house flagship Nova models, including the high-end Premier and Omni models, Reel video-generation model, and Canvas image-generation model, according to people familiar with the matter.
Some Amazon employees described these models as operating in "KTLO," short for "keep the lights on," an engineering term for software that remains supported for existing customers but is no longer a major development priority.
FMR
According to the people familiar with the matter, resources have increasingly moved away from the existing Nova models and toward a new frontier-model effort led by researcher Pieter Abbeel, who came to Amazon through the acquisition of AI robotics startup Covariant. Known internally as Frontier Model Research, or FMR, the initiative has become a top priority this year.
Under that effort, Amazon is developing a new flagship foundation model that is expected to debut at this year's re:Invent annual conference, which typically happens in the fall.
An Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider the company has long supported AI models in production for extended periods because customers depend on them, and said Amazon remains committed to investing in frontier models.
"AI models remain one of the most important things we're working on, and that hasn't changed," the spokesperson said. "As with any AI portfolio, we continually evolve our model lineup based on what customers need, and we always provide customers clear guidance and migration paths as models advance."
Job cuts and departures
The organizational change does not necessarily mean Amazon is abandoning Nova altogether. The remaining Nova portfolio includes the Nova 2 Sonic and Nova 2 Lite foundation models, Nova Forge, a service for building and customizing models, and Nova Act, Amazon's AI agent technology. Indeed, the new model that FMR is developing could emerge under the Nova brand.
Instead, the shift reflects a broader reorganization of Amazon's AI efforts that has unfolded over the past year.
Amazon created its AGI organization in 2023 to build foundation models and other technologies capable of powering future AI products across the company. Rohit Prasad, a longtime Alexa executive, led the organization until he departed in December 2025.
The AGI organization oversaw several specialized groups. One was AGI Lab, which Amazon established in 2024 after hiring AI startup Adept's cofounders and licensing its technology. Led by Adept cofounder David Luan, the lab focused on long-term AI research. Luan left Amazon in February, and the company shut down the AGI Lab last week as part of the latest reorganization.
Separately, Frontier Model Research was created within the AGI organization to develop Amazon's next generation of frontier AI models. After Prasad's departure, Amazon tapped Abbeel to lead the group. People familiar with the transition said FMR has since become the organization's primary focus.
DeSantis narrows the focus
The broader AGI organization was also reorganized. In December, Amazon placed it under senior vice president Peter DeSantis, combining it with the company's silicon development and quantum computing organizations.
People familiar with the transition said DeSantis has pursued a more focused AI strategy than his predecessor. Under Prasad, Amazon pursued multiple model families spanning text, image, and video generation. DeSantis, however, has concentrated Amazon's engineering talent and computing resources on a smaller number of frontier-model efforts, they said.
Employees said they have received little guidance about the long-term future of Nova models, fueling uncertainty across the organization.
The layoffs surprised many employees, the people said, because frontier model researchers had long been among Amazon's most prized technical talent. Employees said AGI also operated differently from the rest of the company, maintaining separate leveling and compensation systems to compete more aggressively for AI talent.
The changes mark a major shift in Amazon's AI ambitions. Just last year, AWS used its re:Invent conference to unveil Nova Omni 2 as its flagship multimodal reasoning model. In 2023, CEO Andy Jassy personally championed AGI as the team that would build Amazon's most ambitious foundation models, prompting the creation of six new research groups.
Less than three years later, the organization is retiring parts of its flagship Nova lineup and reorganizing around a new frontier model effort.
Criminal groups allegedly groomed and abused a teen girl on Discord and Meta, a lawsuit says.
The victim's case could test Section 230 liability protections on tech platforms, her lawyers say.
Meta wants the case bundled with social media addiction litigation. Discord wants it dismissed.
A woman alleges child abuse rings found her on Discord and Instagram as a teen, then blackmailed her into sending them nude and self-harm photos that they shared across the internet—leaving her with mental and physical scars.
Now she's suing both tech companies in a case her lawyers hope will be a "watershed moment" for holding social media sites accountable, as the FBI warns parents about a rising network of online extortion groups targeting kids.
The anonymous plaintiff made the allegations in a previously unreported lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court in April.
The suit names three groups — CVLT, 764, and Greggy's Cult — that the FBI says groom children online and blackmail them. Multiple members of each group have been arrested by law enforcement.
Discord and Meta have faced scrutiny over their impact on children's mental health and safety. The case could also test whether these social media companies could be liable for criminal activity on their apps and whether Section 230 — the federal law shielding social media companies from user behavior — applies to such cases.
Discord and Meta declined to comment on this specific case. A Discord spokesperson said that disrupting the 764 network is one of its top priorities and that it has been cracking down on the group since 2021, when it first became aware of it. Discord says it works closely with law enforcement, has removed thousands of servers, and has banned hundreds of thousands of users associated with 764 and its affiliates.
The bulk of the plaintiff's claims are against Discord, "due to the stronger causal link between Discord's conduct and her injuries," her lawyers wrote in a filing. She also sued Meta because, she alleges, a CVLT member first contacted and groomed her on Instagram, which Meta owns.
The anonymous plaintiff's case is ongoing. In legal filings, Meta moved to have the case bundled with social media addiction cases. Discord wants the case dismissed entirely, arguing that federal law shields it from liability for content posted by its users.
A Meta spokesperson said CVLT is banned from its platforms and that it has strict policies to prevent child exploitation, suicide, and self-harm.
Meta also says it has specialized teams — including former law enforcement and prosecutors — working with the FBI on the issue, plus a 24/7 incident response team for imminent cases.
The lawsuit describes a 'cycle of fear'
According to her complaint, the plaintiff's ordeal began at age 15, when a member of Greggy's Cult contacted her through a public Discord server. The New Mexico man, Zachary Dosch, allegedly persuaded her to send a video of herself masturbating and livestreamed it to other group members.
Dosch pleaded guilty to federal charges of distributing child-sexual-abuse material in 2023. He, along with four other Greggy's Cult members, was charged again in 2025, on allegations of extorting children, and he pleaded not guilty. A lawyer for Dosch didn't respond to a request for comment.
At 17, after the plaintiff began posting on Instagram about her mental health struggles, another man contacted her on Instagram, the suit alleges. The lawsuit says he turned out to be Collin John Thomas Walker, a member of CVLT, a child exploitation group described as "Neo-Nazi" by the FBI. The lawsuit claims Walker spent months "love bombing" her before finding out her home address and threatening her.
Walker allegedly coerced the plaintiff into obtaining her sexually explicit photos, which he then sent around CVLT's Discord server. He also allegedly coerced her to carve his username into her body, burn herself with candle wax, and starve herself to stay attractive — all while his account remained active on Instagram. Walker was later arrested and pleaded guilty to child exploitation charges in October 2025; a lawyer for Walker didn't respond to a request for comment.
The plaintiff's parents confiscated her phone and returned it when she turned 18 — at which point another online child abuse group called 764 recruited her on Discord, the suit said. She finally escaped by faking her own death, and by the end of May 2022, she "escaped the online hell she had been living in," the lawsuit states.
US law enforcement has arrested and charged multiple 764 members. The FBI said in a warning letter to parents in February that it's investigating more than 350 people tied to 764 and its affiliates.
The lawsuit alleges Discord and Meta's "permissive environments provided these predators with unfettered access, anonymity, and the ability to disseminate images and messages that deepened Plaintiff's trauma," resulting in a "cycle of fear, shame, and emotional despair."
The plaintiff suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, permanent scars, and poor grades, her complaint says.
Discord and Meta face scrutiny in other states
Julie Erickson, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiff, told Business Insider she hopes the lawsuit will pave the way for tech companies to be held accountable for child exploitation rings operating on their platforms.
"We are hopeful that this is sort of a watershed moment," she said.
The suit follows other legal action against Discord over child predators allegedly operating on its platform. The states of Texas, Arkansas, New Jersey, and Nevada have each separately sued Discord since last year for allegedly failing to protect children online. The lawsuits are all ongoing.
Earlier this year, the parents of 13-year-old Jay Taylor — a Washington teen who died by suicide in 2022 after a 764 member allegedly pushed him toward it in a group chat — filed a wrongful death suit against Discord, alleging the company "abetted one of the most depraved and dangerous child abuse cults in modern history." Discord seeks to move the case to private arbitration, citing its terms of service. A Discord spokesperson said the company doesn't comment on legal matters.
Meta was previously found liable in a child exploitation case, a ruling it strongly disputes. In March, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $375 million for, in part, exposing children to sexual predators. New Mexico's attorney general says Meta plans to appeal.
Travis Kalanick travels to his new Austin office at Atoms by jet skiing across Lake Austin.
Theo Wargo/WireImage; Screenshot via @travisk
Travis Kalanick commutes to his Austin office by jet ski across Lake Austin.
The former Uber CEO moved from California to Texas and owns a home on Lake Austin.
"Who else do you know is jet-skiing to work?" he asked on TBPN.
Most people battle traffic to get to work. Travis Kalanick appears to be skipping it altogether.
The Uber cofounder and former CEO posted a video on X in June showing what he called his "5 minute jet ski commute" across Lake Austin to his new office, giving followers a glimpse of hisunconventional trip.
First day at our new Austin office. Video of my 5 minute jet ski commute to work.. 😏😅😂 pic.twitter.com/xMT0C85vW3
On Wednesday, Kalanick said on TBPN that he recently went roughly 70 miles per hour on his jet ski to work. The ride was still five minutes, unless it rained, he said.
He described the ride as a "notch on the belt," asking: "Who else do you know is jet-skiing to work?"
Kalanick said that he did a ChatGPT search for other CEOs who took a jet ski to work. There were one or two, he said, but nobody at a company with over a thousand people.
One of the hosts chimed in: "Only a Texas resident."
Kalanick owns a home on Lake Austin. The billionaire entrepreneur said in his first appearance on the TBPN podcast in March that he has owned the place for five years, drawn in part by the lake and his love of water sports.
There's a growing list of tech leaders who have traded Silicon Valley for Texas. Billionaires and companies alike have been drawn by lower taxes, cheaper real estate, and a friendlier regulatory climate than California, where rising costs and talk of a one-time billionaire wealth tax have rattled some executives. Tesla, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise are among the companies that have shifted major operations to the state.
Kalanick is now leading Atoms, the newly renamed version of City Storage Systems and the parent company of CloudKitchens. The startup is developing AI-powered robots designed to automate repetitive physical work in industries such as food service, mining, manufacturing, and logistics. He previously described Atoms' goal as building "gainfully employed robots" that can take on specialized tasks at an industrial scale.
Kalanick co-founded Uber in 2009 and helped turn it into a ride-hailing giant before resigning in 2017. Since then, he's been focused on building software and robotics for kitchens, mining, and logistics.
And while his move to Austin gives him the choice of several robotaxis, it seems like Kalanick will be boating his way to work.
Hali Mo, a former consultant and product manager, quit her corporate job to start Hali Home Bakes after attending pastry school in Paris.
Katherine Li/Business Insider
Hali Mo quit her corporate job to start Hali Home Bakes after attending pastry school in Paris.
Mo said she found her corporate job unfufilling and that she used to wake up to a sense of dread.
Mo is still navigating the challenges of being a small-business owner, but her brand is growing.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Hali Mo, founder of Hali Home Bakes, a San Francisco microbakery specializing in laminated pastries. The essay has been edited for length and clarity.
When I graduated from Stanford in 2018 with degrees in economics and computer science, I did what I thought I was supposed to do. I joined McKinsey as a business analyst, then moved into design consulting before becoming a product manager at a startup. On paper, everything looked right: good salary, clear career progression, prestigious companies.
After five years in corporate America, I realized I was waking up every day dreading work. I turned 29 and thought, "I don't want to live like this."
I quit my job, planning to take a year off — not to become a baker, but simply to figure out what actually made me happy.
That decision eventually led me to pastry school in Paris, a microbakery that started in my apartment kitchen, and a completely different life than the one I'd imagined for myself.
I followed the path I thought I was supposed to
Growing up, I never had a crystal-clear dream job. Consulting appealed to me because it was practical.
After two years at McKinsey, I moved into product management for a startup. I thought changing roles might solve the problem.
It didn't.
The work itself wasn't fulfilling for me. Every morning, I'd wake up dreading the day ahead while feeling guilty because I knew I was fortunate. I had stability, a good paycheck, and a career that made sense from the outside. Walking away from that felt almost irresponsible.
Eventually, I realized I needed to stop asking what looked impressive and start asking what actually brought me joy.
Pastry school in Paris changed everything
Baking was my serious hobby for years. If someone had asked me for one bucket-list item, it would have been attending pastry school in France.
So in early 2024, I quit my product management job and moved to Paris. I loved being a student again. After years of working, it felt like such a privilege to ask questions without worrying about performance reviews or promotions.
I started posting videos about pastry school. Those videos unexpectedly took off on social media, and by the time I returned to the US, I had an audience that gave me the confidence to ask, "What if I tried selling pastries?"
I moved to New York, where my partner lived at the time, bought a tiny convection oven and a countertop dough sheeter, and started baking under a cottage food license.
My first preorder sold just 40 pastries.
For the first few months, selling even a dozen boxes felt difficult. But gradually people came back, word of mouth spread, and social media continued to grow. By spring, I realized this could actually become something. By fall, I was consistently selling out pop-ups with lines of customers.
It felt like every small success gave me permission to keep going.
Starting over in San Francisco
Mo is testing a July special pastry in her kitchen.
Katherine Li/Business Insider
Then my eight-year relationship ended. Suddenly, it felt like every part of my life was starting over.
Personally, I was rebuilding after the breakup. Professionally, I was leaving behind the customer base I'd spent months building in New York.
I moved back to San Francisco in January and essentially started from scratch. Fortunately, I knew much more than I had the first time around. Within months, I rebuilt my customer base and found a commercial kitchen that could support the specialized equipment I needed.
Now I'm producing around 400 pastries each week and plan to expand to 1,000 with the help of a part-time baking assistant I'm looking to hire.
The trade-offs are real — but so is the joy
Running your own business comes with freedoms I never had in corporate life. I love setting my own schedule and building the kind of workplace culture I want.
There is no paid time off. If I get sick, there are no pastries to sell and no income. I pay for my own health insurance. I haven't had employer 401(k) contributions, and in my first two years as a business owner, I couldn't contribute to a traditional retirement account because I wasn't paying myself enough.
Starting a small business also means funding your own runway. You're spending money long before you're making much of it.
I think the biggest mindset shift has been believing in myself
When I first started the bakery, I was half in and half out. Part of me assumed I'd probably end up going back to corporate. That hesitation made me pass on opportunities and avoid investments that would have helped the business grow.
Now my mindset is completely different. I believe this business will succeed because I believe in my product and my ability to make it succeed.
I don't think everyone should quit their corporate jobs. Some people genuinely love traditional careers, and that's wonderful.
But if you've done the introspection, you have the financial runway, and you know deep down that your work is making you miserable, don't be afraid to take the next reasonable step.
Life is too short to wake up every morning with a sense of dread. I feel incredibly lucky that now, when I wake up, I feel joy instead.
Fremont has been the manufacturing and industrial hub of Silicon Valley for the past few decades.
Today, robotics companies are drawn to the city's mix of talent and manufacturing expertise.
Agility Robotics, Tesla, Meta, and Zoox are among the players that have a foothold in the city.
On a Thursday afternoon, about 70 people gathered around a nearly six-foot-tall humanoid robot outside an unassuming office building.
Employees, executives, and board members of Agility Robotics, along with local officials, had come to christen the humanoid startup's new engineering hub: a 60,000-square-foot facility where nearly 200 existing and new employees will work on the AI and skills for its Digit bipedal robot.
The ribbon-cutting didn't take place in San Francisco, Palo Alto, or San Jose, where some leading robotics companies have decided to cluster. Agility chose Fremont — an East Bay city better known for its industrial parks than for Silicon Valley startup mythology — to plant its new center.
Agility Robotics held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open its new R&D hub in Fremont.
Lloyd Lee/BI
Agility is the latest robotics startup to have a foothold in the area. Over the past 15 years, Fremont has seen companies tied to robotics or autonomous vehicles set up shop in the city.
Tesla, Meta, Zoox, Pony.ai, and DoorDash are among the big-name players that have established a footprint in Fremont to support their robotics ambitions.
At Agility's new facility, engineers will teach Digit new tasks and improve the skills it already has.
"This is going to be the robot school," Jonathan Hurst, Agility's cofounder and chief robot officer, told Business Insider. "This is where we teach robot skills. It's really going to be centered here."
The hardware side of Silicon Valley
Fremont's rise as a robotics center builds on an industrial history that Mayor Raj Salwan said the city deliberately preserved.
For more than 25 years, the city was home to New United Motor Manufacturing, or NUMMI, a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota. When the plant shut down in 2010, other cities might have converted the site into office space or housing.
Salwan said the city chose another direction.
"We doubled down on industrial,"the mayor told Business Insider. "We preserved our industrial land, and we said we're all in on manufacturing."
Tesla acquired the NUMMI plant that year, preserving Fremont's automotive ties and attracting a network of suppliers. Meanwhile, the city courted other industries, such as semiconductor, biotech, and advanced manufacturing companies, Salwan said.
Tesla's Fremont factory is being converted into a production hub for the company's Optimus humanoid robot.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Now, the manufacturing base is supporting Fremont's latest transition.
Robotics companies need some of the same things that have attracted earlier hardware businesses to the East Bay city, namely large buildings, production expertise, and enough open floor space for machines to move around.
The city tried to make it easier to open such large facilities. Salwan said Fremont streamlined regulations, developed in-house expertise, and changed some zoning rules to allow qualifying projects to move forward without lengthy hearings.
"We tell you everything up front, and then we help fast-track the process," Salwan said. "If you want to build things, Fremont is the place."
The lab meets the factory floor
Large floor space is only half the equation for robotics companies. They also need talent.
Fremont doesn't exactly sit in the heart of the research and venture capital ecosystem found near Stanford University and Sand Hill Road. But it's close enough to tap into the same pool of engineers, investors, and business partners.
The city is roughly 15 miles east of Palo Alto, across the Dumbarton Bridge. The proximity keeps companies like DoorDash and Zoox close to the talent, their headquarters, and their manufacturing hubs throughout the Bay Area.
DoorDash, which is headquartered in San Francisco, designs and builds its delivery bot, Dot, in Fremont through a partnership with Sonic Manufacturing. The partnership allows engineers from DoorDash Labs, the company's robotics arm, to work "shoulder-to-shoulder" with Sonic employees, a DoorDash spokesperson said.
Sonic Manufacturing Technologies has a 120,000-square-foot campus that supports DoorDash's production of its delivery bot, Dot.
Lloyd Lee/BI
"In some situations, going from designing the line to rolling out our first robot could take months or even years," the spokesperson said. "Thanks to the collaboration between the team working at Sonic and our Labs facilities, it only took a matter of weeks."
Anyware Robotics, a small startup founded in 2023 that builds mobile warehouse robots, fits its entire operation inside one 11,000 square-foot Fremont facility.
Torsten Schreiber, Anyware cofounder and VP of go-to-market and product, said everything from software development to robot testing happens in the same building, allowing the startup to iterate quickly.
"Fremont sits at the intersection of Silicon Valley software talent and the East Bay's hardware and manufacturing," he said. "It's a combination that is hard to find anywhere else."
Schreiber said the location also puts his company near its customers' warehouses and distribution operations.
Zoox, Amazon's robotaxi venture, also planted its manufacturing operations in Fremont and the neighboring city of Hayward. Its Fremont site retrofits test vehicles and configures sensor pods, while the Hayward facility assembles the purpose-built robotaxi.
Zoox retrofits its robotaxi testing fleet in Fremont.
Carlos Barria/Reuters
Zoox said the locations are close enough to its headquarters in Foster City to allow daily collaboration between the engineering and manufacturing teams. A Zoox spokesperson said the company is hiring for several positions supporting the two sites.
Physical AI needs physical space
In 2022, Meta expanded operations not far from its Menlo Park headquarters with a Fremont campus. Today, that campus is heavily focused on hardware research and development, particularly robotics and virtual- and augmented-reality devices, a Meta spokesperson said.
Across the street is Agility's new hub.
Fremont is not about to replace San Francisco or the Peninsula as the Bay Area's startup and venture capital centers. Instead, the city's role has proven to be more physical, enabling companies to expand their robotics ambitions and place engineers near the factory floor.
Tesla earlier this year said its first large-scale Optimus humanoid production line would replace the Model S and Model X lines at its Fremont plant.
Agility, meanwhile, will continue to manufacture its Digit humanoid in Salem, where the startup is headquartered, while expanding its engineering pool in the Bay Area, Hurst, the cofounder, said.
Agility Robotics' Fremont center will also host investors and customers passing through Silicon Valley.
Agility Robotics
In Fremont, Digit will undergo extensive testing as engineers teach the humanoid new skills.
As the robotics race heats up, investors are hungry to see robots work beyond a demo video. Hurst said that Agility's new Fremont presence will also give customers and investors already passing through the Bay Area a chance to see Digit in action.
"It's no longer acceptable to show just a demo or a video of a robot doing a thing," Hurst said, adding that the Fremont location saves visitors from making a trip to Agility's Salem HQ.
"Having this here so people can swing through is really convenient."
Gail Pellet and her husband, Stephan Van Dam. "We all became driven insane by this noise," Pellet says.
Jeremy Garretson for BI
When Charles Leak and his wife purchased his home in East Hampton, they thought they'd found an oasis of quiet. Far away from their Tribeca apartment in the Near Northwest Woods, a neighborhood known for its secluded calm, their contemporary saltbox style sits back on a one-acre lot, surrounded by Japanese cedars and bamboo.
About five years after he moved in, the leaf blower roars started.
"You know what a chainsaw sounds like? These are louder. Usually, there are multiple. It becomes a symphony," Leak, who has worked as a contractor and a fine artist, tells me. "It's quieter in the city."
Leak and many other East Hampton residents say leaf blowers have instilled a reign of terror in their idyllic hamlet, home to the summer estates of billionaires like Barry Rosenstein and Len Blavatnik. They're far from alone. From Palm Beach to Aspen, homeowners say they're being plagued by the near-constant hum and toxic hiss of these motorized monsters. Most commercial blowers burn a mixture of oil and gas and release as much as 30% of their unburned fuel into the air. And they're not just whirring in the spring. With wealthy homeowners hungry for bigger lawns and ultra-manicured landscaping, more homes have hired weekly or twice-weekly crews, year-round.
Charles Leak, photographed at home with his electric leaf blower, came to East Hampton for quiet. Now, he says, it's louder than his Tribeca apartment.
Jeremy Garretson for BI
Driving down his street, Leak points out each house and its noisiness. One property's owner employs landscapers who work until 8 p.m.; another has multiple leaf blowers running at once.
"We should have bought it way back just to keep it quiet," he says, pointing to the neighboring lot. Leak, who eschews traditional grass in favor of moss, has his landscaper use good old-fashioned rakes and gives a $200 tip for the extra effort.
How do we get people to stop thinking of their lawn as their living room rug?Edwina von Gal, landscape designer
His neighbors have organized against the cacophony. The pages of The East Hampton Star are riddled with articles and letters to the editor about the issue. In East Hampton, gas leaf blowers have been prohibited between May 20 and September 20 since 2021, but local groups say the enforcement is virtually nonexistent. The town's ordinance enforcement department received 140 calls related to leaf blowers last year, and 133 the year prior.
Now, some are pushing for a year-round ban on gas-powered blowers. It would be a costly switch. Customers, no matter how rich, don't want to swallow a price increase by switching to pricier electric blowers, local landscapers say, and with private equity firms hoovering up mom-and-pop landscaping shops, the bottom line is emphasized now more than ever.
Across America, leaf blowers have become a political lightning rod: More than 200 cities and several states have issued bans or restrictions on gas-powered leaf blowers. The pursuits of two different bourgeois dreams — a perfect lawn or quietude — are at war.
"It's about privilege and what constitutes privilege these days," says Setha Low, an East Hampton homeowner and anthropology professor at the City University of New York. "Very wealthy people want to control their environment."
Behind the gates and hedges, East Hampton homeowners favor lawns that require near-constant care.
Jeremy Garretson for BI
Even on a rainy day in May, East Hampton's landscapers are busy prepping for the summer season. Their trucks are all over town, stopped at red lights in front of the Louis Vuitton and Prada stores, and parked by eight- and nine-figure mansions.
Outside Town Hall, Gail Pellet shows off a pollinator garden she and her husband, Stephan Van Dam, have tended through the ChangeHampton, an ecological organization they run together. In between pointing out flower species, she stops person after person to mention the group's latest initiative: abolishing gas leaf blowers for good.
Everyone has an opinion: "They're disgusting and ridiculous," says one resident. "We can't enjoy this beautiful place," says another.
Several residents say COVID-19 was when the clamor got unbearable. Summer and weekend people who migrated east to ride out the pandemic became exposed to the cacophony of spring and fall, when heavy-duty landscaping takes place. Trying to work, socialize, or think became impossible.
"We all became driven insane by this noise," Pellet says.
Gail Pellet, the cofounder of ChangeHampton, is spearheading a petition to extend the gas leaf blower ban year-round.
Jeremy Garretson for BI
One of Van Dam's favorite things about his time in East Hampton is access to Three Mile Harbor, where he swims every morning. Except on certain Thursdays, one of the busiest days for landscapers as they prep for weekend residents. The noise becomes intolerable, and the water turns murky.
"They come in like a hovercraft for an hour and a half. The noise. The dust," he says.
A few summers ago, the blowers woke him up from a late summer nap. "I was so incensed," he says. "I ran over there and told the owner to shut them up."
Drive down Further Lane, where houses sell for upward of $100 million, and you'll see lawns so pristine they look like carpeting. That's exactly the problem, says Edwina von Gal, a landscape designer who has lived and worked in East Hampton for decades.
"How do we get people to stop thinking of their lawn as their living room rug?" she says, is among the questions that now inform her practice, which focuses on ecological land care and the cultivation of native species.
For years, before leaf blowers were common, von Gal designed what her clients wanted: the bright green lawns they saw in magazines. The richer the Hamptons got, she says, the bigger and smoother the lawns got. "It's a symbol of wealth and control. It's equating size with money and uniformity with money," she says.
Achieving that putting green-style perfection requires chemical sprays, the destruction of naturally occurring vegetation, and a cavalcade of leaf blowers.
"They just want to make sure it's all looking good when they come out," Jeff Peters, who has been a landscaper in the Hamptons for decades, said. "God forbid if not."
Peters, who was using an electric leaf blower so quiet I couldn't hear it through the phone when we spoke ahead of Memorial Day weekend, charges his clients as much as $60,000 a year for planting, maintenance, and cutting. When they arrive after a traffic-riddled Jitney ride, they want it to look like they're getting their money's worth.
Stephan Van Dam and Gail Pellet have championed East Hampton's natural landscape, including spearheading the community pollinator garden.
Jeremy Garretson for BI
Hamptons residents also want to get their money's worth for solitude. The wealthy "don't want any kind of intrusion," Low says, and that includes sound.
"Here in East Hampton, the regime is a very, very, very elite white kind of culture," which is a culture of silence, she says. "No leaf blowers; you don't want to hear construction. You don't want to hear work."
Beyond East Hampton, leaf blowers have become a pet issue of libertarians across America. In March, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reversed a gas leaf blower ban across the state.
"I like gas-powered better," he said after signing the bill into law. "And if that's what you believe, then you should be able to do that."
Gas leaf blowers have been the subject of growing scrutiny over their health and environmental impacts — as well as the noise.
Jeremy Garretson for BI
"They're making it a partisan issue," Pellet says.
So far, her organization's petition to ban gas leaf blowers year-round in East Hampton has received close to 400 signatures; she'll make another push for signatures when the seasonal ban ends in the fall. But not everyone in the community is supportive.
An Instagram post about the petition from The East Hampton Star received 618 comments — more than nearly every other post from the local newspaper since. Many of them flagged the high costs the ban would entail.
54% of landscapers say they've been approached about selling their company in the past 12 months.
Electric-powered professional-grade leaf blowers from outdoor tool manufacturer Husqvarna retail for between $310 and $500. Add in the charger and a battery, and it comes to nearly $1,800. The company's gas-powered, professional-grade blowers start at $300 and max out at just under $900. Landscapers say they also have to buy extra batteries, which last about an hour and a half, and pay for outfitting a trailer with chargers and a generator.
"It's getting to the point now that maybe in a couple years I would say screw it, it's not worth it," Peters says.
For the past two decades, private equity shops have been buying up local landscaping businesses, collecting lucrative recurring revenue. In Lawn & Landscape Magazine's annual industry survey last year, 54% of respondents said they'd been approached about selling their company in the past 12 months.
"The services are recurring, your grass continues to grow," Robert Tymowski, a managing director at Livingstone Partners, tells me. When it comes to leaf blowing, he says there is little reason to switch to electric: "You really don't have an economic incentive to care about your customer's neighbor necessarily." He noted that he uses an electric blower on his own property.
"There's kind of a misincentive or misalignment between the costs associated with going with a quieter solution and also just the, call it the quality of the work," he adds, citing the need for batteries and chargers and the reduced power of electric blowers. "There's a number of things happening there, but they kind of all conspire against making a pivot to the quieter technology."
Following the law would be one incentive.
While the larger and more established landscapers in East Hampton tend to adhere to the summer ban, many of the smaller ones don't, locals say. That leaves rule-following shops like Peters' at a competitive disadvantage, as they have to charge customers more to adopt the technology that adheres to the rules.
Better enforcement could solve that. The East Hampton law states that violating the ban could result in suspension or revocation of licenses and fines up to $5,000.
In East Hampton, where privet hedges and status trees cost a premium, landscaping bills can add up to six figures annually.
Jeremy Garretson for BI
East Hampton residents say oversight is nonexistent. Code enforcement typically shows up well after the violating party has left, some say, and that's only if you manage to reach something.
"They're already done and gone, so that doesn't work," Leak says, "Then when you call them to complain about it, they start to get this attitude that you're like some kind of crazy radical."
Many would like to see the homeowners shouldering the burden of the fines and more extreme repercussions. Pellet suggested that neighbors should be able to videotape violators to report them in a sort of vigilante justice — or at least send them to journalists.
On the morning of May 20, the day East Hampton's seasonal ban went into effect, Leak took a video of his property. Drowning out the bird chirps was the hum of a leaf blower.
Madeline Berg is a correspondent at Business Insider, where she covers the wealthy, famous, and powerful.
Kirsten Ganas was ready to fire her real estate agent.
It was late March, right in the thick of homebuying season in southwest Pennsylvania. Ganas and her partner, Austin McCarley, had recently learned they were expecting their second child, and they were thrilled at the prospect of upgrading from their two-bedroom rental. They were less enthused, however, about the services provided by their agent, Dan Waterhouse. He'd reached out to them in early January, after they requested their first home tour on Zillow; since then, Waterhouse had shown them roughly two dozen properties. He was nice but sometimes slow to respond, Ganas says, and he lived far from their desired area — no good in a fast-moving market. Shortly after getting outbid on a property, Ganas texted to let him know they'd be moving on.
There was just one problem. When they met Waterhouse for that first home tour, he'd handed them a couple of documents: standard paperwork, he explained, that they would have to sign before seeing the home together. One of those documents contained language that exclusively bound the pair to Waterhouse's brokerage for a year. The only way to terminate that agreement, Waterhouse said, would be to get permission from Rita Sumney, the head of the brokerage. When Ganas contacted Sumney, she got more bad news: getting out of the agreement would come at a cost. Unless they paid an "early termination fee" or found another brokerage willing to pay Sumney a referral fee, they'd be tied to her brokerage well into January 2027. If they bought a home any earlier — even without using an agent at all — they'd still owe the full commission they'd agreed to: a flat fee of $995 plus a percentage of the sale price, which would likely amount to thousands of dollars.
"We just got that sick feeling about being stuck in this contract," Ganas tells me.
Ganas and McCarley had signed a "buyer representation agreement," a contract outlining the terms of the relationship between buyer and broker. Until just a couple of years ago, this would have been unusual — agents typically waited to hand their client any formal documentation until later in the process. But thanks to a seismic legal settlement in 2024, most agents are now required to get a written agreement before they step through the front door with a client. One broker I spoke with at the time called it "the biggest change in 100 years."
The new rule was intended to make sure buyers know exactly what they're signing up for when they enlist an agent. But consumer advocates warn that millions of prospective buyers risk being tethered to inept agents or agreeing to inordinate fees before they've had a chance to get a feel for the relationship. In many ways, these contracts are the most tangible byproducts of a settlement designed to shore up consumer protections. Two years in, though, the results are mixed.
"The idea that buyer-broker agreements have to be signed before they show any houses is great," says Doug Miller, a real estate lawyer in Minnesota who helped craft the class-action lawsuits that led to the settlement. "But the practice of springing this on a consumer at the threshold is amazingly unfair and dishonest."
Not so long ago, many buyers' agents readily advertised their services as "free." Of course, this wasn't true — nobody works for free — but it may have felt true to buyers because of the roundabout way in which their agents got paid. The vast majority of buyers never cut a check to their representative. Instead, both brokers quietly banked a slice of the seller's haul. Here's how things would generally go:
Jackie is selling her $500,000 home and agrees to pay a 6% commission to the brokers who make the deal happen.
Her agent lists the house on the multiple listing service, or MLS — a local database where agents advertise homes for sale — and promises to pay a 3% commission to any agent who delivers the winning buyer.
Jerome, with the help of an agent from another brokerage, offers to buy Jackie's home for the full asking price. The two sides hammer out a deal.
After the sale closes, Jackie pays $30,000 to her broker, who then splits that amount with Jerome's broker. Both brokers walk away with $15,000.
All of this money comes from the buyer's down payment and mortgage, but from Jerome's perspective, it's out of sight, out of mind.
This state of affairs was upended in the fall of 2023, when the National Association of Realtors, the industry's main trade group, lost a multibillion-dollar, class-action lawsuit over agent commissions. The plaintiffs, a group of aggrieved sellers, argued that this method of paying agents forced them to accept inflated fees and opened the door to tactics such as "steering," which discouraged negotiations over commissions. The ensuing settlement, unveiled in the spring of 2024, included a few rule changes. Key among them was a new requirement for the vast majority of agents: before so much as touring a home with a client, they'd need to agree on the terms of the relationship — in writing.
For much of the 21st century, many buyers' agents readily advertised their services as "free."
Bloomberg/Getty Images
The exact details of these contracts can vary dramatically. When it comes to specifics like fees or term length, it's up to buyers and their agents to fill in the blanks. The agreements can range from one day to an entire year, or from "exclusive" to "non-exclusive" — a version that allows a buyer to work with multiple brokerages at once, though they'll likely owe a commission to the agent who shows them the winning home. Some agents might initially have buyers sign a "touring agreement" to show them a property or two before deciding whether to enter a lengthier relationship.
The practice of springing this on a consumer at the threshold is amazingly unfair and dishonest.Doug Miller, real estate lawyer in Minnesota
Prior to the settlement, at least 15 states required buyers' agents to have a signed agreement in hand at some point in the process, though not necessarily at the very beginning, researchers at the Federal Reserve found. In the rest of the country, a buyer's agent may never have bothered to get one signed, since the MLSs could be counted on to step in and ensure everyone was paid according to the advertised commission. The new rule's aims seemed noble. Agents work for a fee, after all, and both broker and client should be clear on what they'll get out of the relationship and how long they'll be tied together. Almost immediately, though, problems arose. State Realtor associations and individual brokerages began crafting lengthy forms that some lawyers and consumer-advocacy groups lambasted as needlessly dense. Any buyer, critics argued, would struggle to parse the thick legalese and unfamiliar terms.
"For a lot of buyers, this is completely new," says Sharon Cornelissen, director of housing at the Consumer Federation of America. "They're not used to having to sign a contract."
Ganas and McCarley were unaware of all the contractual hubbub when they began their house hunt at the end of December. After scrolling through Zillow for a bit, they clicked the blue "request a tour" button for a place that caught their eye. This shuttled their contact information to Dan Waterhouse, one of many thousands of agents who pay Zillow a fee in exchange for leads on potential buyers. The house quickly went under contract, but he arranged to show them a few other properties, starting with a handsome three-bedroom, two-bathroom home in Somerset, Pennsylvania.
It wasn't until they were standing at the house's entrance, eager to begin the tour, that Waterhouse mentioned the representation agreement. By then, more than a week had passed since their initial contact over text. The conversation about the contract was brief, Ganas says, with Waterhouse explaining it in broad strokes — stuff like "you're not going to work with multiple Realtors at a time," she recalls. Ganas and McCarley took turns holding their daughter while they signed on the wall of the home's entryway. "It was really naive of us," Ganas tells me. But at that early stage, she says, they hadn't expected to enter such a binding arrangement.
"It just didn't feel like it was a proper setting, or properly explained," Ganas says. "All those things kind of added up to us not realizing the extent of that document."
Waterhouse disputes this. He tells me via email that he explained the primary differences between the "exclusive" and "non-exclusive" contracts, and that both Ganas and McCarley said they'd prefer the exclusive (Ganas denies that he presented them with this choice). He also says that he provided a summary of the numerous items on each page, including the term length and his typical fees, "and they each had an opportunity to read through it in detail."
Most real estate agents are now required to get buyers to sign an agreement before touring homes together — a stark change.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Upon closer inspection, the agreement contained several provisions that have long raised concerns among consumer advocates. For one, the yearlong lockup was far lengthier than the two- to three-month term recommended by groups like the Consumer Federation of America and Consumer Policy Center. "You can always extend it," says Wendy Gilch, a fellow at the CPC. "It is much more difficult to get out of it." Ganas and McCarley had also agreed to pay Waterhouse a commission of 4% of the home's sale price — well above the national average of 2.7% — plus a $995 flat fee (the CFA has referred to this additional charge, often called an admin fee, as a "junk fee"). The contract didn't mention anything about the buyer's options to terminate the agreement. And if Ganas and McCarley decided not to buy, and ended up leasing a property at any point during the one-year timeframe, they'd still owe the brokerage one month's rent plus the $995 fee.
"I saw that, and my heart dropped," Ganas tells me. "I didn't even realize that was in there. I didn't know that was even a thing."
All of these details are perfectly legal, and Ganas readily admits that she and McCarley are adults who signed a contract. But she can't shake the feeling that they entered the conversation at a disadvantage. Real estate agents live and breathe this stuff, while the typical consumer buys or sells a home only a handful of times in their life.
"How many people could read that contract and understand all the implications of it?" says Prentiss Cox, who teaches consumer-protection law at the University of Minnesota.
How many people could read that contract and understand all the implications of it?Prentiss Cox, consumer-protection law professor
A common refrain in the industry is that any broker worth their salt would release a buyer if the relationship truly isn't working — handcuffing them to a contract isn't worth the negative online reviews or harsh word-of-mouth. "We're not interested in tying people up in an agreement they don't want to be in," says Laura Ellis, a brokerage executive in Illinois.
Sumney, the broker Waterhouse works under, maintains a different view. "To be honest with you, I really hate that perspective," she tells me. "When you let somebody out of an exclusive buyer-agency contract, you've just devalued that contract for every Realtor in our industry." A home search may very well take a year, Sumney says, and even then, a real estate agent has no guarantee of a payday. (Waterhouse tells me that he has worked with other clients for over three years while they searched for a home.) Though agents partner with a brokerage, most are independent contractors who rely on commissions — all those weekends and evenings spent working don't yield a cent unless a deal goes through. As for the fees, the buyer representation agreement clearly says they're negotiable before signing, Sumney says. Even after the agreement was finalized, Ganas was able to bargain Waterhouse's commission down to a more typical 3%, from the initial 4%, when she and McCarley made an offer on a home.
Waterhouse tells me via email that Ganas generally had "high expectations" regarding property availability, her "large and varied search area," and response times.
"Dan is one of our top agents," Sumney tells me. "He has the numbers to show it. So one bad review next to all of these other clients that he has, that appreciated Dan, had no problem paying Dan, understood what his commission was — you know, you've got to weigh it."
Requiring signed agreements doesn't appear to affect real estate commissions, Federal Reserve researchers found.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
On March 31, an incensed Ganas called Sumney to seek a release from the agreement. It didn't go well. "I did kind of raise my voice," Ganas tells me. "I was a little emotional." Eventually, Ganas calmed down, and Sumney offered to find another agent at her brokerage who lived closer to them. If they wanted to enlist a different brokerage, Sumney said, she could work out a referral fee. Ganas asked about paying to end the contract, and Sumney said she could calculate an early termination fee based on the work Waterhouse had done for them so far. After talking with McCarley, though, Ganas turned resolute: "I'm like, 'No. You do not get any money from me.'"
The next day, Sumney posted a video on her TikTok. Seated at her desk and speaking directly into her phone camera, she issued an impassioned primer on buyer representation agreements — and the importance of understanding that "contracts are legal and binding."
"Please, guys, if you are signing anything, please understand what you are signing and allow the Realtor to explain it," Sumney said. "And if you have a Realtor who will not explain these forms to you, who is only sending them over and signing them right there, then get another one."
Perhaps we expected too much of these agreements. A few extra signatures were never going to fix the squabbling over real estate commissions or the often messy relationship between buyer and agent. An NAR spokesperson tells me via email that the rule changes have "further empowered consumers to negotiate compensation and promoted transparency in the marketplace." But research published last year by the Federal Reserve found that, prior to the settlement, state laws requiring signed buyer representation agreements had no significant impact on commissions — in other words, buyers weren't suddenly more likely to bargain down fees if they were handed a contract to sign. And despite the rule changes, most sellers are still offering to cover buyers' agent commissions, keeping the old, roundabout way of paying brokers intact. Almost two years after the settlement went into effect, predictions of a massive shift in real estate fees haven't come to pass.
The consumer advocates, lawyers, and brokers I spoke with all offered some version of this advice for prospective buyers: Think like a seller. If you choose to work with an agent, interview at least a few of them to get a sense of which one might best suit your needs. Make sure you're clear-eyed about the terms of your arrangement and the fact that, one way or another, you could be on the hook for thousands of dollars. Ask whether those services are worth it, and what your alternatives might look like.
"Really do your research upfront," Cornelissen, from the CFA, tells me. "Because once you sign, you may be stuck with them for a while."
Ganas and McCarley continue to keep tabs on the market, but for now, their home search is on pause. Their plan is to wait until their agreement expires in January, when they'll resume the hunt — this time with a year's worth of harsh lessons under their belt.
"When we're ready to buy a house," Ganas tells me, "I will be much more versed, I guess, in these things."
James Rodriguez is a correspondent on Business Insider's Discourse team.
