OpenAI folds its standalone robotics team as general model Astra hits 74.8% on a robot benchmark versus 51% for specialist models

OpenAI has disbanded its standalone robotics team and moved the researchers elsewhere, betting that its general-purpose models can now run robots directly.

According to a Fortune exclusive on Nov. 13, the robotics research group now sits in the main research team under Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, while applied robotics and hardware moved into the Applied organization under president Greg Brockman. A spokesperson said robotics remains core to OpenAI's long-term vision and called the change a sign of commitment, not retreat. The move was so recent that OpenAI still had booth #208 reserved at the CoRL robotics conference in Austin this week; when Fortune visited, it sat empty.

OpenAI said that early this year it expected to build robotics on top of Sora, but frontier models such as GPT-6 Astra proved directly usable on robots. In an Nvidia study, an Astra-powered agent hit a 74.8% success rate on a simulated manipulation benchmark, versus 51.0% for the best specialized robot models. OpenAI also shut a robotics team in 2020 and rebuilt one in 2024; its Figure partnership ended in February 2025. Sam Altman is targeting a first public demo of an in-house humanoid in 2027.

The X post relaying the news drew about 980 likes. Andrew Curran noted that "Anthropic reported a similar sudden and unusual jump in robotics capabilities with Fable 5.2." Others pushed back, sharing a post calling the headline "misleading" and saying the team is making big progress by leaning on Astra and newer models. MIT professor Russ Tedrake told Fortune that robot companies still hold an edge in real-world deployment data.