Anthropic held talks to buy robot startup Physical Intelligence
anthropic explored acquiring robotics firm physical intelligence this spring, signaling its shift from pure software to embodied ai as the race for agentic intelligence heats up.
anthropic held acquisition talks with physical intelligence this spring, according to the information, sparking a weekend rumor that the robotics ceo publicly denied with a slack gif. physical intelligence, co-founded by investor lachy groom and valued at $11 billion, specializes in the π0.5 robot brain model and lists openai and thrive capital among its backers. a deal would give anthropic immediate expertise in physical ai, complementing its software-only research like project fetch, where claude controlled robot dogs 20 times faster than human-ai teams. the move signals a strategic pivot where frontier labs believe physical world grounding is a prerequisite for superintelligent systems, despite openai previously dissolving its robotics unit in 2021 before recently reversing course.