It’s been a big year for AI acquisitions — so big that most barely register anymore. Anthropic and OpenAI have gone on buying sprees, buying developer tools, AI service shops, and product-testing startups to turn model capability into business revenue and expand their reach faster than the other. That’s what made a rumor over the weekend about Anthropic’s acquisition of robotics startup Physical Intelligence. It spread extremely fast, even after being denied by the CEO of Natural Intelligence.
Part of that has to do with who is involved. Natural Intelligence is not some dark robotics shop. It was founded by Lachy Groom, an investor-manager whose star has been on the rise in Silicon Valley in recent years. has raised more than $1 billion (and was reportedly in talks this spring for another $1 billion round at an $11 billion valuation). and its π0.5 model is apparently among the most widely used robot brains in robotics research.
As it turns out, the rumor wasn’t entirely false. In fact, human and natural intelligence held talks on the acquisition this spring, according to The Information, so tech blogger Robert Scoble — whose weekend post at X started the frenzy — he might have gotten the details wrong without mistaking that something had happened.
Natural Intelligence’s response to the rumor was not the strongest denial in the world, it should be noted. According to The Information, Natural Intelligence CEO Karol Hausman told employees the reports weren’t true via a Slack message that included a gif of a character from “The Office” shaking her head no.
Groom, for his part, did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, sent Monday night.
Anthropic has made four known acquisitions this year. OpenAI is more aggressive, acquiring at least 17 companies since 2023. Both, of course, are now preparing to go public. Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1, followed by OpenAI a week later, creating 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 amount of text on the Internet can replace it.
OpenAI’s story here is instructive. It built an early robotic arm that could solve a Rubik’s Cube, then shut down the entire robotics team in 2021, with co-founder Wojciech Zaremba later saying the approach was missing the pieces needed for true superintelligence. The team returned in 2024, quietly building a humanoid robotics lab in San Francisco, before CEO Sam Altman made it official in late May, announcing that “OpenAI Robotics” was hiring and describing a short-term focus on robots for infrastructure work, with a long-term goal of a personal robot for everyone.
Anthropic hasn’t built anything resembling OpenAI’s hardware lab. What it has done is publish a number of investigative pieces through its internal team testing extreme capabilities at the border for security reasons. This included Project Fetch last November, where Anthropic staff tested how much Claude could help non-experts program a robot dogand a second phase in June that, according to Anthropic, found that a newer model completed the same tasks about 20 times faster than the best human and Claude team from the previous year.
Buying an existing robotics team would allow Anthropic to skip years of work. However, there is a potential complication. Physical Intelligence was founded in San Francisco about two years ago by Groom, former Google researchers and professors from Stanford and Berkeley, and its early investor base is very similar to OpenAI’s own, 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 is itself an investor in Natural Intelligence, so it’s not just a peripheral player. is a shareholder in a company that its main competitor has reportedly been in acquisition discussions with very recently.
That raises questions about whether OpenAI’s early investment came with information rights or a right of first refusal over a sale to a competitor — the kind of safeguards that strategic investors sometimes negotiate for just this scenario.
That leaves open the possibility that if Natural Intelligence is really in play, OpenAI—already a shareholder, already close to Groom, already trying to make sure it’s the best Anthropic in robotics—might have the most obvious claim to it than Anthropic. We put these questions to OpenAI earlier today, and the company did not respond.
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