OpenAI has disbanded its stand-alone robotics team, moving its researchers onto other teams.<\/p>\n
The company confirmed the reorganization when asked about it by Fortune. A company spokesperson said that robotics remains a core part of OpenAI\u2019s long-term vision and portrayed the reorganization as a sign of the company\u2019s commitment to robotics, rather than a retreat from it.<\/p>\n
OpenAI said it has reassigned its robotics research team to the company\u2019s main research team, reporting to Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, while the applied robotics and hardware teams have been reassigned to the company\u2019s larger Applied organization, which reports to OpenAI President Greg Brockman.<\/p>\n
The change came recently enough that OpenAI had already registered a booth at CoRL, a top academic robotics conference in Austin, this week. Though the conference app and floor plan marked OpenAI\u2019s spot, when Fortune visited booth #208, it sat empty with OpenAI\u2019s logo nowhere to be seen.\u00a0<\/p>\n
OpenAI had a robotics team in its early days but wound it down in 2020, with cofounder Wojciech Zaremba later citing limited robot data and a more efficient path toward artificial general intelligence (AGI)\u2014the human-like AI that has been OpenAI\u2019s goal since its founding\u2014through other methods. In particular, OpenAI became increasingly devoted to training ultra-large language models on vast datasets of human-written text. This is the approach that eventually yielded the company\u2019s breakthrough product ChatGPT in late 2022.<\/p>\n
OpenAI rebuilt a stand alone robotics team in 2024, announcing a partnership with the startup Figure to develop AI models for humanoid robots. That partnership ended in February 2025, when Figure said it would develop its own robot AI. OpenAI has said it is currently developing its own humanoid robot, with CEO Sam Altman targeting a first public demonstration in 2027. <\/p>\n
The company spokesperson said that despite the reorganization, OpenAI remains committed to bringing general-purpose robots into the world.<\/p>\n
The reorganization reflects a bet that is gaining traction across the AI industry: that general-purpose models built for language, code, and vision can also be used for \u201cembodied AI\u201d\u2014where AI models control devices that can act in the physical world, such as robots, driverless cars, or drones. This would obviate the need to have separate robotics teams building specialized AI models just to be the digital \u201cbrains\u201d for robots.<\/p>\n
Researchers have seen surprising performance when connecting GPT-6 Astra to robots, directly using the general-purpose AI model to perform some robotic tasks.<\/p>\n
Guanya Shi, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University\u2019s Robotics Institute, reacted to the change at OpenAI, telling Fortune that he would interpret the move as a signal that OpenAI sees robotics as \u201cno longer a special problem.\u201d Instead, he said, they likely see robotics as a challenge that can be addressed as a downstream application of general intelligence\u2014similar to the way the same underlying frontier AI models now power specialized coding tools, or tools for legal or financial work.<\/p>\n
OpenAI seemed to confirm this view in its response to Fortune. It said that at the start of the year, the company\u2019s researchers assumed the best way to make progress on robotics was to build on its work on AI models such as Sora, a video generation model that, in order to create realistic videos, had to have some implicit understanding of how the physical world works.<\/p>\n
But since then, the company spokesperson said, the company\u2019s general-purpose frontier models, including GPT-6 Astra, have shown that can be directly applied to robotics. This discovery is what motivated OpenAI to disband the stand alone robotics team and move the affiliated researchers onto teams working on more general AI models.<\/p>\n
The reorganization also comes at a time when OpenAI is under pressure to rein in its costs and show that it is more focused on a few, core products. Last year, Altman told the company that it needed to abandon \u201cside quests,\u201d and the company has jettisoned some efforts\u2014including Sora\u2014in order to reallocate computing resources to more core and potentially-profitable endeavors. The company is under pressure to stanch its heavy operating losses\u2014which reportedly totaled $10.9 billion in the most recent quarter\u2014as it seeks to close a new funding round and prepares for a possible IPO in early 2027.<\/p>\n
This line of thinking\u2014that general AI models can be applied directly to controlling robots without the need to create specialized models with \u201cspatial intelligence\u201d\u2014would seem to challenge the assumptions underpinning many of today\u2019s robotics startups, which have raised billions on the premise that robots need brains of their own.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But Russ Tedrake, an MIT professor and cofounder and CEO of Walden Robotics, said robotics companies still have an advantage the AI labs don\u2019t: Their robots are already gaining work experience in real places, such as on factory floors. Such \u201cdeployment\u201d experience\u2014and the data these robots gather\u2014helps robots adapt to specific workplaces and tasks. Better foundational models make that site-specific data more valuable because robots can learn from it faster, Tedrake said.<\/p>\n