This year has seen a flurry of AI acquisitions, so many that most barely draw attention. Anthropic and OpenAI have both been on buying sprees, snapping up developer tools, AI service firms, and product-testing startups to turn model capabilities into enterprise revenue and outpace each other. That is why a weekend rumor about Anthropic acquiring robotics startup Physical Intelligence stood out. It spread incredibly fast, even after Physical Intelligence's CEO denied it.
Part of the reason for the buzz lies in who is involved. Physical Intelligence is not a minor robotics company. It was co-founded by Lachy Groom, an investor-operator whose star has been rising in Silicon Valley. The startup has raised more than $1 billion and was reportedly in talks this spring for another $1 billion round at an $11 billion valuation. Its π0.5 model is considered one of the most widely used robot brains in robotics research.
The rumor was not entirely baseless. According to The Information, Anthropic and Physical Intelligence did hold acquisition talks this spring. Tech blogger Robert Scoble, whose weekend post on X sparked the frenzy, may have gotten the specifics wrong but was not wrong that something had happened.
Physical Intelligence's response to the rumor was not a forceful denial. According to The Information, CEO Karol Hausman told employees the reports were not true via a Slack message that included a gif of a character from "The Office" shaking her head no. Groom did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment, sent Monday night.
Anthropic has made four known acquisitions this year. OpenAI has been more aggressive, acquiring at least 17 companies since 2023. Both are also preparing to go public. Anthropic confidentially filed 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.
Why Robotics Now?
The most likely answer is that understanding the physical world may be a prerequisite for superintelligent systems, and no amount of internet text can replace it.
OpenAI's own history is instructive here. It built an early robotic hand that could solve a Rubik's Cube, then shut down its entire robotics group in 2021. Co-founder Wojciech Zaremba later said the approach was missing pieces needed for real superintelligence. The team came back in 2024, quietly building a humanoid robotics lab in San Francisco. CEO Sam Altman made it official in late May, announcing "OpenAI Robotics" was hiring and describing a near-term focus on robots for infrastructure work, with a personal robot for everyone as the long-term goal.
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Anthropic has not built anything resembling OpenAI's hardware lab. Instead, it has published a series of research pieces through its internal group that stress-tests frontier capabilities for safety purposes. That included Project Fetch last November, where Anthropic staff tested how much Claude could help non-experts program a robot dog. A second phase in June found that a newer model completed the same tasks roughly 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. There is a possible complication, though. Physical Intelligence was founded in San Francisco roughly two years ago by Groom, former Google researchers, and professors from Stanford and Berkeley. Its early investor base looks a lot like OpenAI's own, 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.
OpenAI's Stake in Physical Intelligence
OpenAI is itself an investor in Physical Intelligence, so it is not just a peripheral player. It is a stakeholder in a company that 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. These are the kind of protective provisions that large strategic investors sometimes negotiate for precisely this scenario.
That leaves open the possibility that if Physical Intelligence is actually in play, OpenAI, already a shareholder, already close to Groom, and already trying to ensure it beats Anthropic in robotics, may have the more obvious claim to it than Anthropic does. TechCrunch asked OpenAI these questions earlier today and the company did not respond.