The year 2023 has been a significant one for AI acquisitions, with major players like Anthropic and OpenAI going on a buying spree to acquire developer tooling, AI services shops, and product-testing startups. These acquisitions aim to convert model capability into enterprise revenue and extend their reach faster than their competitors.
Recently, a rumor surfaced on AI Twitter that Anthropic was in talks to acquire robotics startup Physical Intelligence. The news spread rapidly, even after a denial from Physical Intelligence’s CEO, Karol Hausman, who sent a Slack message to employees with a GIF of a character from ‘The Office’ shaking her head no.
Who’s Involved?
Physical Intelligence is not just any ordinary robotics shop. It was co-founded by Lachy Groom, an investor-operator whose star has been on the rise in Silicon Valley in recent years. The company has raised over $1 billion and was reportedly in talks for another $1 billion round at an $11 billion valuation this spring.
Physical Intelligence’s π0.5 model is also among the more widely used robot brains in robotics research. The company’s early investor base looks a lot like OpenAI’s own, including Khosla Ventures and Thrive Capital. Founders Fund, a major OpenAI investor, was reportedly involved in Physical Intelligence’s newest funding round earlier this year.
In fact, OpenAI is itself an investor in Physical Intelligence, making it a stakeholder in a company that its chief rival was reportedly in talks to buy very recently. This raises questions about whether OpenAI’s early investment came with any information rights or a right of first refusal over a sale to a competitor.
Why Robotics, Why Now?
The likeliest answer to why Anthropic and OpenAI are interested in robotics is that physical-world understanding may be a prerequisite for superintelligent systems. No amount of internet text can substitute for real-world experience, and robots can provide a bridge between the digital and physical worlds.
OpenAI’s own history in robotics is instructive. It built an early robotic hand that could solve a Rubik’s Cube, but then shut down the entire robotics group in 2021. Co-founder Wojciech Zaremba later said that the approach was missing pieces needed for real superintelligence. The team came back in 2024, quietly building a humanoid robotics lab in San Francisco, before CEO Sam Altman made it official in late May, announcing ‘OpenAI Robotics’ was hiring and describing a near-term focus on robots for infrastructure work, with a personal robot for everyone as the long-term goal.
Anthropic hasn’t built anything resembling OpenAI’s hardware lab. Instead, it has published a string of research pieces through its internal group that stress-tests frontier capabilities for safety purposes. This includes Project Fetch last November, where Anthropic staff tested how much Claude could help non-experts program a robot dog, and a second phase in June that found a newer model completed the same tasks roughly 20 times faster than the best human-plus-Claude team from the year before.
Buying an existing team with robotics expertise would let Anthropic skip years of work. However, there’s a possible complication: Physical Intelligence was founded in San Francisco roughly two years ago by Groom, former Google researchers, and professors from Stanford and Berkeley. Its early investor base looks a lot like OpenAI’s own, and OpenAI is itself an investor in Physical Intelligence.
