A weekend rumor about Anthropic acquiring robotics startup Physical Intelligence sparked debate on AI Twitter, though both companies denied the deal. The Information confirmed that Anthropic and Physical Intelligence did hold acquisition talks this spring, making the rumor partially accurate. Tech blogger Robert Scoble’s post on X set off the frenzy, though he may have gotten the specifics wrong without being entirely incorrect about something happening. Physical Intelligence’s CEO, Karol Hausman, responded to the rumor mill with a Slack message containing a gif of a character from 'The Office' shaking her head no. Groom, co-founder of Physical Intelligence, did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Anthropic has made four known acquisitions this year, while OpenAI has acquired at least 17 companies since 2023. Both are also preparing to go public, with Anthropic confidentially filing for an IPO on June 1, followed by OpenAI a week later, setting up what could be two of the largest U.S. stock debuts in history. The move toward robotics may be driven by the belief that physical-world understanding is a prerequisite for superintelligent systems, with no amount of internet text substituting for it. OpenAI’s own history in robotics is instructive, having built an early robotic hand that could solve a Rubik’s Cube before shutting down the robotics group in 2021. The team returned in 2024, quietly building a humanoid robotics lab in San Francisco, with CEO Sam Altman making it official in late May. Anthropic hasn’t built anything resembling OpenAI’s hardware lab but has published research through its internal group, including Project Fetch, where staff tested how much Claude could help non-experts program a robot dog and found a newer model completing the same tasks 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, Physical Intelligence’s early investor base overlaps significantly with OpenAI’s, including Khosla Ventures and Thrive Capital. Founders Fund, also 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 its chief rival was reportedly in talks to buy very recently. That 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. That leaves open the possibility that if Physical Intelligence is actually in play, OpenAI may have the more obvious claim to it than Anthropic does. We asked OpenAI these questions earlier today, and the company did not respond.
Source: techcrunch
