It’s been a big year for AI acquisitions — so big that most of them barely register anymore. Anthropic and OpenAI have each gone on buying sprees, acquiring developer tools, AI services shops, and product testing startups to turn their modeling capabilities into enterprise revenue and scale faster than others. That’s what brought the rumors of Physical Intelligence, the robotics startup acquiring Anthropic, into focus over the weekend. Even after the denial of the CEO of Physical Intelligence, it spread very quickly
Part of it depends on who is involved. Physical Intelligence is not some obscure robotics shop. It was founded by star investor-operator Lachy Groom on the rise in recent years in Silicon Valley; It has raised more than $1 billion (and was reportedly in talks for something else this spring $1 billion round worth 11 billion dollars); and his π0.5 model is probably one of the more widely used robot brains in robotics research.
As it turns out, the rumor wasn’t entirely false. Actually anthropic and physical intelligence conducted sales negotiations This spring, according to The Information, technology blogger Robert Scoble – whose weekend post ten X began to rage—perhaps mistaking the minutiae for something wrong.
Physical Intelligence’s response to the rumor was not the strongest denial in the world, it should be noted. According to The Information, Physical Intelligence CEO Karol Hausmann shook his head and told employees the news was false via a Slack message that included a gif of a character from “The Office.”
The groom, for his part, did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment on Monday night.
Anthropic made four notable acquisitions this year; OpenAI has been more aggressive, acquiring at least 17 companies since 2023. Both, of course, are now preparing to go public. On June 1, Anthropic filed confidentially for an IPO, followed by OpenAI a week later, in what could be two of the largest US stock debuts in history.
So why robotics, why now? The most likely answer is that an understanding of the physical-world may be a prerequisite for superintelligent systems, and no internet text can replace it.
OpenAI’s history here is instructive. He created an early robotic hand that could solve a Rubik’s Cube, then shut down the entire robotics team in 2021, after co-founder Wojciech Zaremba said the approach was missing the pieces needed for true superintelligence. The team returned in 2024, quietly building a humanoid robot lab in San Francisco before CEO Sam Altman. made it official Announcing OpenAI Robotics in late May was to capture and outline 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. What he does is publish a series of research papers through his in-house team that tests border capabilities for security purposes. This includes Project Fetch last November, when Anthropic employees tested how well Claude could help non-experts. robot dog software and a second phase in June found a newer model performing the same tasks about 20 times faster than the previous year’s best human-plus-Claude team, according to Anthropic.
Acquiring an existing team with robotics expertise will allow Anthropic to operate for years to come. However, there is a possible complication. Physical Intelligence was founded nearly two years ago in San Francisco by Groom, former Google researchers and Stanford and Berkeley professors, and its initial investor base is very similar to OpenAI itself, including Khosla Ventures and Thrive Capital. Founders Fund — also a major OpenAI investor — reportedly participated in Physical Intelligence’s newest funding round earlier this year.
In fact, OpenAI itself is an investor in Physical Intelligence, so it’s not just a peripheral player; it owns a stake in a company that its main competitor has recently been in talks to buy.
That raises questions about whether OpenAI’s early investment had any right to information or right of first refusal to sell to a competitor — protective clauses that big strategic investors sometimes negotiate for just this scenario.
If this is Physical Intelligence really in play, OpenAI — already a shareholder, already close to Groom and trying to provide the best of Anthropic in robotics — may have a more obvious claim than Anthropic. We put these questions to OpenAI earlier today and the company did not respond.
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