A weekend rumor that Anthropic was acquiring Physical Intelligence, a robotics startup valued at roughly $11 billion, spread fast enough to rattle AI Twitter. It spread even after Physical Intelligence CEO Karol Hausman told employees the reports were not true, reportedly via a Slack message containing a GIF of a character from "The Office" shaking her head no.
The rumor was not completely baseless. According to The Information, Anthropic and Physical Intelligence actually held acquisition talks this spring. Tech blogger Robert Scoble, whose post on X set off the frenzy, may have gotten the specifics wrong without being wrong that something had happened between the two companies.
Why this rumor landed
Part of the speed comes down to who is involved. Physical Intelligence is not an obscure robotics shop. It was co-founded by Lachy Groom, an investor-operator whose star has risen sharply in Silicon Valley. The company has raised more than 11 billion valuation. Its software is apparently among the more widely used robot brains in robotics research.
Anthropic has made four known acquisitions this year. OpenAI has been more aggressive, acquiring at least 17 companies since 2023. Both are now preparing to go public. Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1, followed by OpenAI a week later. In that context, a major robotics acquisition would be a signal move.
Why robotics, why now
The likeliest answer is that physical-world understanding may be a prerequisite for superintelligent systems, and no amount of internet text can substitute for it. OpenAI's own history here is instructive. It built an early robotic hand that could solve a Rubik's Cube, then shut the entire robotics group down 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. In late May, CEO Sam Altman announced "OpenAI Robotics" was hiring, describing a near-term focus on robots for infrastructure work, with a personal robot for everyone as the long-term goal.
Anthropic has not built anything resembling OpenAI's hardware lab. What it has done is publish research through its internal safety group stress-testing frontier capabilities. That included Project Fetch last November, where Anthropic staff tested how much Claude could help non-experts with complex tasks, and a second phase in June that found 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. But there is a complication.
The OpenAI connection
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 is itself an investor in Physical Intelligence. It is not 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 around whether OpenAI's early investment came with information rights, or a right of first refusal over a sale to a competitor. Those are the kind of protective provisions strategic investors sometimes negotiate for precisely this scenario.
If Physical Intelligence is actually in play, OpenAI, already a shareholder, already close to Groom, and already trying to ensure it bests Anthropic in robotics, may have the more obvious claim to it than Anthropic does. TechCrunch asked OpenAI about these questions and the company did not respond.
Groom, for his part, did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment either. The rumor may have been denied, but the underlying chess game between Anthropic and OpenAI over robotics talent and capability is very much still on the board.