It’s been an enormous yr for AI acquisitions — so huge that almost all of them barely register anymore. Anthropic and OpenAI have every gone on shopping for sprees, snapping up developer tooling, AI companies retailers, and product-testing startups to transform mannequin functionality into enterprise income and lengthen 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 lately; it has raised greater than $1 billion (and was reportedly in talks this spring for an additional $1 billion round at an $11 billion valuation); and its π0.5 model is outwardly among the many extra extensively used robotic brains in robotics analysis.
Because it seems, the rumor wasn’t utterly 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 mistaken with out being mistaken that one thing had occurred.
Bodily Intelligence’s response to the rumor mill wasn’t the world’s most vigorous denial, it needs to be famous. In keeping with The Data, Bodily Intelligence CEO Karol Hausman advised staff the experiences weren’t true through 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 evening.
Anthropic has made 4 identified acquisitions this yr; OpenAI has been extra aggressive, buying a minimum of 17 firms since 2023. Each are additionally, after all, now getting ready to go public. Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1, adopted by OpenAI per week later, organising what could possibly be two of the most important 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 methods, 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 strategy was lacking items wanted for actual superintelligence. The staff 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 deal with robots for infrastructure work, with a private robotic for everybody because the long-term objective.
Anthropic hasn’t constructed something resembling OpenAI’s {hardware} lab. What it has executed is publish a string of analysis items via its inside group that stress-tests frontier capabilities for security functions. That included Challenge Fetch final November, the place Anthropic employees examined how a lot Claude might assist non-experts program a robot dog, and a second section in June that, based on Anthropic, discovered a more moderen mannequin accomplished the identical duties roughly 20 instances quicker than one of the best human-plus-Claude staff from the yr earlier than.
Shopping for an current staff 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 seems lots 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 yr.
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 strategic traders typically negotiate for exactly this situation.
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 in the present day and the corporate didn’t reply.
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