Privately owned AI21 Labs, headquartered in the US, was founded in 2017 and employs approximately 230 individuals. The company specializes in software development, providing access to language models that power text generation and comprehension features.
On July 7, 2026, Professor Amnon Shashua, a co-founder of AI21 Labs, informed the company of his intention to step down from both the company and its board of directors after nine years. This departure follows a turbulent year for AI21, which underwent a major restructuring including sweeping layoffs as it shifted its strategic focus. Also on July 7, the company released a study demonstrating the efficacy of both horizontal and vertical scaling strategies for SWE agents as part of its broader focus on agent optimization, noting that experiments traditionally applied a uniform compute budget across problems regardless of task difficulty. Previously, on June 30, AI21 Labs addressed the documented issue of increasing token spend, citing Goldman Sachs' expectation of a 24x growth by 2030, which has led AI leaders to tackle different questions. Earlier, on June 24, AI21 Labs achieved the top position on the DeepResearch Bench II (DRB II) benchmark, scoring 64.38 and exceeding the previous best reported result by 3.2 points across 132 tasks and 9430 expert-written rubrics.
Subscribe for full access to AI21 Labs's products in full detail 
