OpenAI Folds Its Stand-Alone Robotics Team Into Research and Applied, Betting General Models Can Run Robots
OpenAI confirmed to Fortune that robotics researchers now report to chief research officer Mark Chen and the applied robotics and hardware teams to president Greg Brockman. The company says the move speeds up robotics rather than retreating from it.
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OpenAI has disbanded its stand-alone robotics team and moved the people on it into other parts of the company, Fortune reported on Friday. OpenAI confirmed the change when Fortune asked about it and cast it as a sign of commitment to robotics, not a retreat.
Under the new setup, the robotics research group now sits inside OpenAI's main research team, reporting to Chief Research Officer Mark Chen. The applied robotics and hardware teams have moved into the company's larger Applied organization, which reports to President Greg Brockman. A company spokesperson told Fortune that robotics remains a core part of OpenAI's long-term vision.
At a glance
| Item | Detail | Source |
|---|---|---|
| What changed | Stand-alone robotics team disbanded; staff reassigned | OpenAI via Fortune |
| Robotics research | Now part of main research, under Mark Chen | OpenAI via Fortune |
| Applied robotics and hardware | Now part of Applied, under Greg Brockman | OpenAI via Fortune |
| OpenAI's reason | General frontier models such as GPT-6 Astra can be applied directly to robotics | OpenAI via Fortune |
| Humanoid plans | OpenAI says it is building its own humanoid; Altman targets a first public demo in 2027 | Fortune |
An empty booth at CoRL
The change happened recently enough that OpenAI had already registered a booth at CoRL, a leading academic robotics conference held in Austin this week. Fortune reported that the conference app and floor plan still showed OpenAI at booth #208, but when its reporter visited, the space was empty and OpenAI's logo was nowhere to be seen. A few former members of the robotics team still drew a crowd there, with no display or demo.
The bet behind the move
OpenAI told Fortune that at the start of the year its researchers assumed the best route to robotics ran through models like Sora, the video generator that had to capture some implicit sense of how the physical world behaves. Since then, the spokesperson said, general-purpose frontier models including GPT-6 Astra have shown they can be applied to robotics directly. That finding is what prompted OpenAI to fold the separate team into groups working on general models.
Fortune described experiments in which researchers gave Astra camera images, robot information and a control interface it could use to command a robot. In an Nvidia study, an Astra-powered agent reached a 74.8% success rate on a simulated manipulation benchmark, compared with 51.0% for the best specialized robot models on that leaderboard, according to Fortune. The result was in simulation, not on physical robots.
Guanya Shi, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, told Fortune he reads the reorganization as a sign that OpenAI sees robotics as "no longer a special problem," but rather a downstream application of general intelligence, much as the same frontier models now power coding and legal tools.
A long, uneven history
This is not OpenAI's first change of course on robots. Fortune recounted that the company had a robotics team in its early years but wound it down in 2020; co-founder Wojciech Zaremba later pointed to limited robot data and a more efficient path toward artificial general intelligence through other methods. OpenAI rebuilt a stand-alone team in 2024 and announced a partnership with the startup Figure to build AI models for humanoid robots. That partnership ended in February 2025, when Figure said it would develop its own robot AI.
OpenAI now says it is developing its own humanoid robot, and CEO Sam Altman is targeting a first public demonstration in 2027, Fortune reported. The spokesperson said OpenAI remains committed to bringing general-purpose robots into the world.
The reorganization also lands as OpenAI tries to narrow its focus. Fortune noted that Altman told staff last year to abandon "side quests," that the company has dropped some efforts, including Sora, to free computing power for core products, and that it reportedly posted a $10.9 billion operating loss in its most recent quarter while seeking a new funding round and preparing for a possible IPO in early 2027.
Why robot makers are not conceding
If general models can drive robots, that challenges the premise behind many robotics startups that have raised billions on the idea that robots need purpose-built brains. Researchers Fortune spoke with were not ready to declare that contest over.
Russ Tedrake, an MIT professor and co-founder and CEO of Walden Robotics, told Fortune that robotics companies hold an advantage AI labs lack: robots already gaining work experience on factory floors and in other real places. Better foundation models make that site-specific data more valuable, he said, because robots can learn from it faster.
Shi pointed to a practical limit. Large language models are powerful but slow and are hosted in the cloud, so a robot running on one needs a constant network connection. He still sees a role for smaller, specialized models that run on a robot's own computer. Pete Florence, co-founder of the robot-model startup Generalist, told Fortune it was unclear that any existing model would dominate robotics in the long run.
The specialized camp is still shipping. Two days before Fortune's report, on Nov. 11, Runway released open weights for Praxis-1, a 27-billion-parameter "world action model" for robots, under the Apache 2.0 license. Runway says Praxis-1 predicts video and actions together, reached 46.2% success across 1,200 episodes on Nvidia's RoboLab-120 leaderboard, and runs on Nvidia hardware down to the Jetson Thor computer mounted on a robot. Launch partners Noble Machines, Standard Bots and Ultra have run it on a legged humanoid, a six-axis industrial arm and a dual-arm warehouse robot, according to Runway and The Robot Report. Those performance numbers are Runway's own.
What to watch
The questions now are concrete. Will OpenAI's general models control physical robots, not just simulated ones, with the speed and reliability factories need? Will the 2027 humanoid demonstration arrive on schedule? And will robotics startups' deployment data prove to be the moat Tedrake describes, or will the big labs close the gap from the model side?
How we reported this
DailyMech read Fortune's exclusive, Runway's Praxis-1 announcement and The Robot Report's Praxis-1 story in full. Other reports on the reorganization repeated Fortune and were not used. The reorganization details are OpenAI's account as given to Fortune, and the Nvidia study figures are as Fortune described them; DailyMech did not read that study. DailyMech contacted no one for this article.
Published November 13, 2026. Facts checked against the cited sources by DailyMech's AI writer.
Sources
- Exclusive: OpenAI disbands its stand-alone robotics team as its general models start running robots, Wen Shao, Fortune, Nov. 13, 2026 (fully read).
- Praxis-1 Is Now Available, Runway, Nov. 11, 2026 (fully read).
- Runway's Praxis-1 world action model for robotics is now available, Brianna Wessling, The Robot Report, Nov. 12, 2026 (fully read).
DailyMech used AI tools to research and draft this article. Facts were checked against the cited sources by DailyMech's AI writer, not by a human editor.