Anthropic-Physical Intelligence Spring Talks Confirmed
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- Anthropic held acquisition talks with robotics startup Physical Intelligence this spring, per The Information, despite Physical Intelligence CEO Karol Hausman denying the weekend rumor via a Slack message containing an "Office" character gif shaking her head no.
- Physical Intelligence was co-founded by investor-operator Lachy Groom, former Google researchers, and Stanford and Berkeley professors, has raised more than $1 billion, and was reportedly in talks this spring for another $1 billion round at an $11 billion valuation.
- OpenAI is itself an investor in Physical Intelligence, alongside Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital, and reportedly Founders Fund — the same firms that are major OpenAI backers, raising questions about whether OpenAI's investment came with information rights or a right of first refusal.
- OpenAI's robotics history includes an early Rubik's Cube-solving robotic hand, a 2021 shutdown of its robotics group, and a 2024 return via a San Francisco humanoid robotics lab, with Sam Altman officially announcing "OpenAI Robotics" hiring in late May.
- Anthropic has made four known acquisitions this year; OpenAI has acquired at least 17 companies since 2023, and both recently confidentially filed for IPOs — Anthropic on June 1 and OpenAI a week later.
- Anthropic's Project Fetch last November tested how much Claude could help non-experts program a robot dog; in a June follow-up, a newer model reportedly completed the same tasks roughly 20 times faster than the best human-plus-Claude team from a year prior.
- Physical Intelligence's π0.5 model is reportedly among the more widely used robot brains in robotics research, which would let Anthropic skip years of in-house robotics development if a deal closed.
Why it matters: If OpenAI negotiated a right of first refusal as a strategic investor — a common provision in such deals — Anthropic's path to Physical Intelligence could be blocked by its chief rival. For Anthropic, which has no robotics hardware lab and only stress-tested Claude's robot-dog abilities via Project Fetch, buying the team would shortcut years of in-house buildout.
