OpenAI disbands independent robotics team

According to a Fortune report, OpenAI has disbanded its independent robotics research team and reassigned the researchers to other departments; the company has confirmed the adjustment. The former robotics research team was merged into the core research team, reporting to Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, while the applied robotics and hardware teams were placed under the Applied division, led by President Greg Brockman. OpenAI emphasized that robotics remains central to the company's long-term vision and that this adjustment is not an exit from the robotics field. The report said OpenAI found that general frontier models, including GPT-6 Astra, can already be applied directly to robotics tasks; in an NVIDIA study, an agent powered by Astra achieved a 74.8% success rate on a simulated robotic manipulation benchmark, higher than the 51.0% best publicly reported result for specialized robotics models on that leaderboard, and the experiment was conducted in a digital simulation environment. The adjustment also comes amid company cost-control pressure; according to reports, OpenAI's operating loss reached $10.9 billion in its most recent quarter, and the company is seeking a new funding round and preparing for a possible IPO in early 2027.