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OpenAI folds its robotics team into the rest of the company, leaving booth #208 bare

SummaryOpenAI reorganized its stand-alone robotics team so recently that its booth at a top robotics conference had no logo, display or demo, Fortune reported. OpenAI says it's speeding up robotics, not retreating.

· MODEL Editors · 1 min read

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Cartoon of a robotics conference hall. Booths #206 and #210 on either side have a robot arm, a live demo screen and crowds. In the middle, booth #208 is bare: a dashed outline reads (logo goes here), a yellow tent card says DEMO: TBD, and a lone small robot waves from behind the table saying: They said general models run robots now. So I'm running the booth. Caption: No logo. No display. No demo. Very general. Watermark: MODEL · readmodelmag.com.
Booth #208, staffed by the general model. Illustration by MODEL. Original. Image source.

What happened. OpenAI has broken up its stand-alone robotics team and moved the people onto other teams, Fortune reported on Nov. 13. OpenAI confirmed the change when Fortune asked. Robotics researchers now report to Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, and the applied robotics and hardware teams moved into the Applied organization under President Greg Brockman (Fortune (opens in a new tab)).

Booth #208. The change came so recently that OpenAI had already registered a booth at CoRL, a top academic robotics conference in Austin this week. When Fortune first visited booth #208, it was empty, with no OpenAI logo. Later, a few former members of the team stood around the booth and still drew a crowd, with no display or demo (Fortune (opens in a new tab)).

OpenAI's side. A spokesperson told Fortune that robotics remains a core part of OpenAI's long-term vision and that the move is meant to speed up robotics, not retreat from it. The company said general-purpose models such as GPT-6 Astra have shown they can be applied directly to robots, so a separate team was no longer needed. The Decoder updated its own story on Nov. 14 after OpenAI clarified that robotics work continues (The Decoder (opens in a new tab)).

The evidence they point to. Fortune cites an Nvidia study in which an Astra-powered agent hit a 74.8% success rate on a simulated manipulation benchmark, compared with 51.0% for the best specialized robot models on that leaderboard. That was a simulation, not a real robot.

Second time around. OpenAI wound down its first robotics team in 2020, rebuilt one in 2024 alongside a partnership with Figure that ended in February 2025, and is now folding the team into the wider company. OpenAI says it is still developing its own humanoid robot, and Sam Altman is targeting a first public demo in 2027 (Benzinga (opens in a new tab)).

The MODEL take. If you build robotics or agent products on top of a big lab's model, watch which org owns the feature. When the dedicated team goes away, the roadmap goes with the general model's release schedule.

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Sources

  1. Exclusive: OpenAI disbands its stand-alone robotics team as its general models start running robots

    Fortune

  2. OpenAI reassigns robotics researchers to other teams as general-purpose models might make specialized robotics AI unnecessary

    The Decoder

  3. OpenAI Dismantles Standalone Robotics Team as it Bets on Bigger AI Models

    Benzinga

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