OpenAI disbands standalone robotics team, betting general-purpose models can run robots directly; 2027 humanoid demo target unchanged

OpenAI has disbanded its standalone robotics team, Fortune reported exclusively on 13 November. The robotics researchers have moved into the company's main research organisation under chief research officer Mark Chen, while the applied robotics and hardware staff have moved into the larger Applied organisation under president Greg Brockman. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the reorganisation to Fortune, saying robotics remains core to the company's long-term vision and that its target of a first public humanoid demonstration in 2027 stands.

The reasoning: general-purpose models can now run robots directly

OpenAI's stated reason is that general-purpose frontier models can now be applied to robot control directly, so a separate team building robot-specific models is no longer the fastest way forward. The evidence cited is a study run by Nvidia on 14 October: researchers used GPT-6 Astra as a robot controller on RoboLab-120, a simulated pick-and-place benchmark, and achieved a 74.8 percent success rate with no special robot training at all, against 51.0 percent for the best dedicated robot model, Lakeside. RoboLab-120 is a simulated environment, not a test on physical robots. OpenAI has published no blog post about the change and has not said how many people were affected.

A second closure, as a rival takes the opposite path

This is the second time OpenAI has closed a robotics team: it disbanded its first robotics team in 2021, rebuilt a standalone team in 2024 and partnered with Figure to build models for humanoid robots, and has since said it is developing its own humanoid, with chief executive Sam Altman targeting a first public demonstration in 2027. Meanwhile the industry is splitting: Runway has released Praxis-1, an open-weight dedicated robot model with 27 billion parameters under an Apache 2.0 licence, the opposite bet to OpenAI's "the general model is the robot" approach.

(File photo: the hand of a humanoid robot.)