It’s been a giant yr for AI acquisitions — so large that the majority of them barely register anymore. Anthropic and OpenAI have every gone on shopping for sprees, snapping up developer tooling, AI providers outlets, and product-testing startups to transform mannequin functionality into enterprise income and prolong their attain sooner than the opposite. Which is what made a weekend rumor about Anthropic buying robotics startup Bodily Intelligence stand out. It unfold exceedingly quick, even after a denial from Bodily Intelligence’s CEO
A part of that ties to who’s concerned. Bodily Intelligence isn’t some obscure robotics store. It was co-founded by Lachy Groom, an investor-operator whose star has been on the rise in Silicon Valley lately; it has raised greater than $1 billion (and was reportedly in talks this spring for an additional $1 billion round at an $11 billion valuation); and its π0.5 model is outwardly amongst of the extra broadly used robotic brains in robotics analysis.
Because it seems, the rumor wasn’t fully spurious. Anthropic and Bodily Intelligence really did hold acquisition talks this spring, in keeping with The Info, so tech blogger Robert Scoble — whose weekend post on X set off the frenzy — might have gotten the specifics fallacious with out being fallacious that one thing had occurred.
Bodily Intelligence’s response to the rumor mill wasn’t the world’s most vigorous denial, it must be famous. In response to The Info, Bodily Intelligence CEO Karol Hausman informed staff the reviews weren’t true through a Slack message containing a gif of a personality from “The Workplace” shaking her head no.
Groom, for his half, didn’t reply to TechCrunch’s request for remark, despatched Monday night time.
Anthropic has made 4 recognized acquisitions this yr; OpenAI has been extra aggressive, buying a minimum of 17 firms since 2023. Each are additionally, in fact, now making ready to go public. Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1, adopted by OpenAI per week later, organising what may very well be two of the most important U.S. inventory debuts in historical past.
So why robotics, why now? The likeliest reply is that physical-world understanding could also be a prerequisite for superintelligent techniques, and no quantity of web textual content can substitute for it.
OpenAI’s personal historical past right here is instructive. It constructed an early robotic hand that might remedy a Rubik’s Dice, then shut your entire robotics group down in 2021, with co-founder Wojciech Zaremba later saying the method was lacking items wanted for actual superintelligence. The crew got here again in 2024, quietly constructing a humanoid robotics lab in San Francisco, earlier than CEO Sam Altman made it official in late Might, saying “OpenAI Robotics” was hiring and describing a near-term deal with robots for infrastructure work, with a private robotic for everybody because the long-term objective.
Anthropic hasn’t constructed something resembling OpenAI’s {hardware} lab. What it has executed is publish a string of analysis items by way of its inner group that stress-tests frontier capabilities for security functions. That included Venture Fetch final November, the place Anthropic employees examined how a lot Claude may assist non-experts program a robot dog and a second part in June that, in keeping with Anthropic, discovered a more moderen mannequin accomplished the identical duties roughly 20 instances sooner than one of the best human-plus-Claude crew from the yr earlier than.
Shopping for an present crew with robotics experience would let Anthropic skip years of labor. There’s a attainable complication, although. Bodily Intelligence was based in San Francisco roughly two years in the past by Groom, former Google researchers, and professors from Stanford and Berkeley, and its early investor base seems so much like OpenAI’s personal, together with Khosla Ventures and Thrive Capital. Founders Fund — additionally a significant OpenAI investor — was reportedly concerned in Bodily Intelligence’s latest funding spherical earlier this yr.
In truth, OpenAI is itself an investor in Bodily Intelligence, so it isn’t only a peripheral participant; it’s a stakeholder in an organization that its chief rival was reportedly in talks to purchase very just lately.
That raises questions round whether or not OpenAI’s early funding got here with any data rights, or a proper of first refusal over a sale to a competitor — the type of protecting provisions that giant strategic traders typically negotiate for exactly this state of affairs.
That leaves open the chance that if Bodily Intelligence is definitely in play, OpenAI — already a shareholder, already near Groom, already attempting to make sure it bests Anthropic in robotics — might have the extra apparent declare to it than Anthropic does. We requested OpenAI these questions earlier immediately and the corporate didn’t reply.
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