OpenAI has disbanded its standalone robotics team and reassigned its staff, according to a Nov. 13 Fortune report1 that cites confirmation from a company spokesperson.
OpenAI's stated reason is that its general-purpose models, including GPT-6 Astra, can be applied directly to robotics, so a separate team is no longer needed. Outside researchers quoted by Fortune differ on what that means for specialized robotics work. Techmeme's post2 credits the report to Wen Shao. Automatica has not independently reported the story, and the company statements and expert comments below come through Fortune.
The robotics research team now reports to Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, Fortune said, while the applied robotics and hardware teams moved to the Applied organization, which reports to President Greg Brockman. The spokesperson said robotics remains a core part of OpenAI's long-term vision and called the move a sign of commitment, not a retreat. OpenAI also said it remains committed to bringing general-purpose robots into the world.
OpenAI told Fortune that at the start of the year its researchers assumed robotics progress would build on work such as the Sora video model. Since then, the spokesperson said, its frontier models have shown they can be applied directly to robotics.
The company has changed course on robotics before. Fortune said OpenAI wound down its first robotics team in 2020, with cofounder Wojciech Zaremba later citing limited robot data. It rebuilt a standalone team in 2024 and announced a partnership with the startup Figure, which ended in February 2025 when Figure said it would develop its own robot AI. OpenAI has said it is developing its own humanoid robot, with CEO Sam Altman targeting a first public demonstration in 2027.
Fortune said the change comes as OpenAI is under pressure to rein in costs and focus on a few core products. Altman told the company last year to abandon "side quests," Fortune said, and OpenAI has jettisoned some efforts, including Sora1, to reallocate computing resources. Fortune said operating losses, which it said reportedly totaled $10.9 billion in the most recent quarter, are under pressure as the company seeks to close a new funding round and prepares for a possible IPO in early 2027. Fortune did not say the robotics change was made for cost reasons.
Fortune cited an Nvidia study in which an Astra-powered agent was given camera images, robot information and a control interface. The agent achieved a 74.8% success rate on a simulated manipulation benchmark, against 51.0% reported by the best specialized robotic models on that leaderboard. The test used a digital simulation, not a real robot. Fortune did not name the benchmark, and Automatica has not reviewed the study.
Guanya Shi, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, told Fortune he would interpret the move as a signal that OpenAI sees robotics as "no longer a special problem" and likely sees it as a downstream application of general intelligence. He added that large models are slow and cloud-dependent, so smaller specialized models that run onboard a robot are still needed.
Russ Tedrake, an MIT professor and cofounder and CEO of Walden Robotics, said robotics companies hold an advantage in deployment experience from robots already working in places such as factory floors. Better foundation models make that site-specific data more valuable, he said. Pete Florence, cofounder of Generalist, which trains general-purpose AI models for robots, said it was unclear that any existing model would be the one that dominates robotics in the long run.
Fortune said OpenAI had registered a booth at the CoRL robotics conference in Austin this week, but booth #208 was empty when its reporter visited.