OpenAI folds its stand-alone robotics team into research and Applied, betting general models can run robots

OpenAI has disbanded its stand-alone robotics team and reassigned the researchers to other parts of the company, Fortune reported exclusively on November 13. The company confirmed the reorganization and said the move was meant to accelerate robotics work, not abandon it.

How the team was reassigned

Robotics research now sits inside the main research organization and reports to Chief Research Officer Mark Chen. Applied robotics and hardware teams have moved into the larger Applied organization led by President Greg Brockman.

The change came recently enough that OpenAI had already booked a booth at CoRL, a leading robotics conference in Austin this week. When Fortune visited booth 208, it was empty and OpenAI's logo was nowhere to be seen.

Why the shift

OpenAI wound down an earlier robotics group in 2020 and rebuilt a stand-alone team in 2024, announcing a partnership with startup Figure to develop AI models for humanoid robots. That partnership ended in February 2025, when Figure said it would develop its own robot AI. Chief Executive Sam Altman has said the company is developing its own humanoid robot, with a first public demonstration targeted for 2027.

A spokesperson told Fortune that early this year researchers assumed the best path was to build on work such as Sora, a video model that needs some implicit understanding of the physical world. Since then, the company said, general-purpose frontier models including GPT-6 Astra have shown they can be applied directly to robotics, which is why the stand-alone team was dissolved. Guanya Shi, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, told Fortune he would read the move as a signal that OpenAI now sees robotics as "no longer a special problem."

In an Nvidia study cited by Fortune, an Astra-powered agent reached a 74.8% success rate on a simulated manipulation benchmark, compared with 51.0% for the best specialized robotics models on that leaderboard. Those results came from a digital simulation, not a physical robot.

OpenAI said it remains committed to bringing general-purpose robots into the world.

Sources: Fortune, THE DECODER