OpenAI has disbanded its stand-alone robotics team and reassigned its staff, the company confirmed on 13 November, Fortune reported. The move puts robot research alongside OpenAI’s broader model work, following the company’s finding that GPT-6 Astra can be applied directly to robotics tasks.
Key points
- Robotics researchers are moving to OpenAI’s main research group under Mark Chen.
- Applied robotics and hardware staff are moving to the organisation overseen by Greg Brockman.
- OpenAI says general-purpose models, including GPT-6 Astra, can be applied directly to robotics.
Mark Chen takes the robotics researchers
The robotics research team is joining OpenAI’s main research group, reporting to Chief Research Officer Mark Chen. The applied robotics and hardware teams are joining the larger Applied organisation, which reports to OpenAI President Greg Brockman.
OpenAI’s spokesperson described the reshuffle as an effort to accelerate robotics work and said the field remains part of the company’s long-term plans. The staffing change reaches a team OpenAI rebuilt in 2024, after winding down an earlier robotics group in 2020.
The change was visible at CoRL, an academic robotics conference in Austin. OpenAI had registered booth #208, which appeared in the conference app and floor plan, but Fortune found the booth empty and its logo absent.
GPT-6 Astra changes OpenAI’s approach
OpenAI says its researchers began the year expecting robotics progress to build on Sora, its video-generation model. The company’s spokesperson said its general-purpose frontier models, including GPT-6 Astra, had since shown they could be applied directly to robotics, prompting the decision to move researchers onto teams working on broader AI models.
Guanya Shi, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, told Fortune he interpreted the move as a sign that OpenAI sees robotics as “no longer a special problem”. In his reading, robot control becomes an application of a general model, much as coding tools draw on models also used for other tasks.
An Astra-based agent achieved a 74.8 per cent success rate in a simulated robot-manipulation test, compared with 51 per cent for the best specialised robotics models in that ranking, UA.News reported, citing an Nvidia study. The test took place in a digital simulation rather than on a physical robot.
Figure partnership ended in February 2025
OpenAI’s return to robotics in 2024 included a partnership with Figure, a startup developing humanoid robots, to create AI models for them. That partnership ended in February 2025, when Figure said it would develop its own robot AI.
The earlier OpenAI robotics team had been wound down in 2020. Co-founder Wojciech Zaremba later cited limited robot data and a more efficient route towards artificial general intelligence through other methods as reasons for that decision.
OpenAI says it is developing its own humanoid robot. Chief executive Sam Altman is targeting its first public demonstration in 2027.
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