OpenAI has disbanded its independent robotics team and reassigned researchers who worked there to other parts of the company. The company described the move as an effort to accelerate progress in robotics, not abandon it.
The company confirmed to Fortune that the robotics research team is now integrated into the core research team, reporting to Chief Research Officer Mark Chen. The applied robotics and hardware teams move to the broader Applied organization, which reports to President Greg Brockman.
The change reflects a bet gaining traction in the AI industry: that general-purpose models built for language, code, and vision can also be used for "embodied AI," where models control devices that act in the physical world, such as robots, autonomous cars, or drones. This would eliminate the need to have separate robotics teams building specialized AI models just to be the digital brains of the robots.
Researchers have seen amazing performance in connecting GPT-6 Astra to robots, directly using the general-purpose model to perform some robotic tasks. Guanya Shi, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, told Fortune that he would interpret the move as a sign that OpenAI sees robotics as "no longer a special problem," but as a challenge that can be approached as a top-down application of general intelligence.
OpenAI said that at the beginning of the year its researchers assumed that the best way to advance robotics was to build on their work on models like Sora. But since then, general-purpose frontier models, including GPT-6 Astra, have shown that they can be applied directly to robotics. The company is sticking to its goal of a first public demonstration of its own humanoid robot in 2027.
The reorganization comes as OpenAI is under pressure to contain its costs and show it's more focused on a few commodities. Reported operating losses totaled $10.9 billion in the most recent quarter, as the company looks to close a new round of funding and prepares for a potential IPO in early 2027.
