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OpenAI disbands stand-alone robotics team, citing general models
Fortune, citing an OpenAI spokesperson, reported Friday that OpenAI disbanded its stand-alone robotics team and reassigned staff, saying models such as GPT-6 Astra can be applied directly to robots.
OpenAI has disbanded its stand-alone robotics team and reassigned the researchers, the company confirmed to Fortune on Friday, saying the change is meant to speed robotics work rather than drop it1.
A spokesperson told Fortune that robotics research staff now sit on the main research team under Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, while applied robotics and hardware teams moved into the Applied organization under President Greg Brockman1.
The company said that earlier this year researchers expected progress to come from work on models such as Sora, but that general-purpose frontier models, including GPT-6 Astra, have since shown they can be applied directly to robotics, which motivated ending the stand-alone team1.
Fortune reported that OpenAI had registered a booth at the Conference on Robot Learning in Austin this week, but that booth 208 was empty when a reporter visited1.
OpenAI previously wound down an early robotics effort in 2020, rebuilt a stand-alone team in 2024 with a partnership with Figure that ended in February 2025, and has said it is developing its own humanoid robot, with Chief Executive Sam Altman targeting a first public demonstration in 2027, Fortune reported1.
Carnegie Mellon assistant professor Guanya Shi told Fortune he would read the move as a signal that OpenAI sees robotics as "no longer a special problem"1. MIT professor and Walden Robotics chief executive Russ Tedrake said robotics firms still have an advantage in deployment data from real workplaces1.
Fortune cited an Nvidia study in which an Astra-powered agent scored 74.8 percent on a simulated manipulation benchmark versus 51.0 percent for the best specialized robotic models on that leaderboard1. Shi said large models still tend to be slow and cloud-hosted, so smaller onboard models may still be needed1.
Fortune also placed the reorganization against cost pressure, including a reported $10.9 billion operating loss in the most recent quarter, and said OpenAI has dropped some efforts, including Sora, to concentrate compute; the company did not independently confirm those figures in the spokesperson comments quoted1. OpenAI said it remains committed to general-purpose robots1.
