Tech blogger Robert Scoble set AI Twitter ablaze with a claim: Anthropic is acquiring Physical Intelligence, a robotics AI startup. The deal never materialized. Physical Intelligence CEO Karol Hausman has denied it internally.
But the rumor wasn't entirely baseless. The two sides did discuss an acquisition this spring. Physical Intelligence is building a general-purpose robot foundation model — a single "brain" to control different robots and tasks. Co-founder Sergey Levine calls it "ChatGPT for robots."
Physical Intelligence has raised over $1 billion and is in talks for another $1 billion round that could value it at over $11 billion. Its latest model, π0.7, can handle tasks it wasn't explicitly trained on, guided by language — but it can't yet complete complex multi-step operations from a single command.
Anthropic has dabbled with robot control using Claude on a robot dog, but those experiments remain research-stage. Acquiring Physical Intelligence would give it a ready-made robot control model, training data, and hardware expertise.