It’s been a giant 12 months for AI acquisitions — so large that almost all of them barely register anymore. Anthropic and OpenAI have every gone on shopping for sprees, snapping up developer tooling, AI companies outlets, and product-testing startups to transform mannequin functionality into enterprise income and prolong their attain quicker 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 in recent times; it has raised greater than $1 billion (and was reportedly in talks this spring for one more $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, based on The Data, so tech blogger Robert Scoble — whose weekend post on X set off the frenzy — could have gotten the specifics unsuitable with out being unsuitable that one thing had occurred.
Bodily Intelligence’s response to the rumor mill wasn’t the world’s most vigorous denial, it ought to be famous. In accordance with The Data, Bodily Intelligence CEO Karol Hausman advised staff the stories weren’t true by way of 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 identified acquisitions this 12 months; OpenAI has been extra aggressive, buying a minimum of 17 corporations 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 every week later, establishing what may very well be two of the biggest 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 would clear up a Rubik’s Dice, then shut the complete robotics group down in 2021, with co-founder Wojciech Zaremba later saying the method was lacking items wanted for actual superintelligence. The workforce 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 give attention to robots for infrastructure work, with a private robotic for everybody because the long-term aim.
Anthropic hasn’t constructed something resembling OpenAI’s {hardware} lab. What it has finished is publish a string of analysis items via its inside group that stress-tests frontier capabilities for security functions. That included Mission Fetch final November, the place Anthropic workers examined how a lot Claude may assist non-experts program a robot dog and a second section in June that, based on Anthropic, discovered a more recent mannequin accomplished the identical duties roughly 20 instances quicker than one of the best human-plus-Claude workforce from the 12 months earlier than.
Shopping for an present workforce with robotics experience would let Anthropic skip years of labor. There’s a potential 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 appears 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 12 months.
The truth is, 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 lately.
That raises questions round whether or not OpenAI’s early funding got here with any info rights, or a proper of first refusal over a sale to a competitor — the form of protecting provisions that enormous strategic buyers 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 making an attempt to make sure it bests Anthropic in robotics — could have the extra apparent declare to it than Anthropic does. We requested OpenAI these questions earlier at present and the corporate didn’t reply.
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