It’s been a massive year for AI acquisitions—so massive that most of them barely turn heads anymore. Anthropic and OpenAI have each gone on buying sprees, snapping up developer tools, AI service firms, and product-testing startups to turn model capabilities into enterprise revenue and outpace one another. That’s what made a weekend rumor about Anthropic acquiring robotics startup Physical Intelligence stand out. The story spread like wildfire, even after Physical Intelligence’s CEO denied it.

Part of the buzz comes from who’s involved. Physical Intelligence isn’t just some obscure robotics outfit. It was co-founded by Lachy Groom, an investor-operator whose star has been rising in Silicon Valley. The company has raised more than $1 billion—and was reportedly in talks this spring for another $1 billion round at an $11 billion valuation. Its π0.5 model is also among the most widely used robot brains in robotics research. As it turns out, the rumor wasn’t entirely baseless. According to The Information, Anthropic and Physical Intelligence actually held acquisition talks this spring. So tech blogger Robert Scoble—whose weekend post on X sparked the frenzy—may have gotten the specifics wrong without being wrong that something had happened. Notably, Physical Intelligence’s response wasn’t exactly a forceful denial. CEO Karol Hausman reportedly told employees the reports weren’t true via a Slack message containing a GIF of a character from “The Office” shaking her head no.

Anthropic has made four known acquisitions this year; OpenAI has been more aggressive, acquiring at least 17 companies since 2023. Both are also preparing to go public. Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1, followed by OpenAI a week later, setting up what could be two of the largest U.S. stock debuts in history. So why robotics, and why now? The likeliest answer is that physical-world understanding may be a prerequisite for superintelligent systems—and no amount of internet text can substitute for it. OpenAI’s own history is instructive here. It built an early robotic hand that could solve a Rubik’s Cube, then shut down its entire robotics group in 2021. Co-founder Wojciech Zaremba later said the approach was missing pieces needed for real superintelligence. The team returned in 2024, quietly building a humanoid robotics lab in San Francisco, before CEO Sam Altman made it official in late May, announcing “OpenAI Robotics” was hiring. He described a near-term focus on robots for infrastructure work, with a personal robot for everyone as the long-term goal.

Anthropic hasn’t built anything resembling OpenAI’s hardware lab. What it has done is publish a string of research pieces through its internal group that stress-tests frontier capabilities for safety purposes. That included Project Fetch last November, where Anthropic staff tested how much Claude could help non-experts program a robot dog. A second phase in June found that a newer model completed the same tasks roughly 20 times faster than the best human-plus-Claude team from the year before. Buying an existing team with robotics expertise would let Anthropic skip years of work.

There’s a possible complication, though. Physical Intelligence was founded in San Francisco roughly two years ago by Groom, former Google researchers, and professors from Stanford and Berkeley. Its early investor base looks a lot like OpenAI’s own, including Khosla Ventures and Thrive Capital. Founders Fund—also a major OpenAI investor—was reportedly involved in Physical Intelligence’s newest funding round earlier this year. In fact, OpenAI is itself an investor in Physical Intelligence. That means it isn’t just a peripheral player; it’s a stakeholder in a company that its chief rival was reportedly in talks to buy very recently. This raises questions about whether OpenAI’s early investment came with information rights or a right of first refusal over a sale to a competitor—the kind of protective provisions that large strategic investors sometimes negotiate for exactly this scenario. That leaves open the possibility that if Physical Intelligence is actually in play, OpenAI—already a shareholder, already close to Groom, and already trying to beat Anthropic in robotics—may have the stronger claim to it. We asked OpenAI these questions earlier today, and the company didn’t respond.