OpenAI is in advanced discussions to hire the founder and team behind OpenClaw, a startup focused on building open-source robotic manipulation tools, according to a report from The Information. The deal, which would effectively constitute an acqui-hire, represents the latest and perhaps most telling signal yet that Sam Altman’s artificial intelligence juggernaut is preparing to make a serious push into robotics — a domain it once explored and then abandoned years ago.
The move comes at a time when the broader AI industry is pivoting aggressively toward what executives and researchers have begun calling “physical AI” — the application of large-scale machine learning models not just to text, images, and code, but to the control of robots operating in the real world. For OpenAI, which divested its robotics research team in 2021, the courtship of OpenClaw marks a significant strategic reversal and suggests the company believes the technology has finally matured enough to warrant renewed investment.
What OpenClaw Brings to the Table — and Why OpenAI Wants It
OpenClaw has carved out a niche in the robotics community by developing open-source tools for robotic manipulation — the ability of a robot arm or hand to grasp, move, and interact with physical objects. Manipulation is widely regarded as one of the hardest unsolved problems in robotics, requiring not just precise motor control but also the kind of contextual understanding and adaptability that large AI models are increasingly capable of providing. The startup’s work has focused on making these capabilities more accessible to researchers and developers, building simulation environments and benchmarks that allow rapid iteration on manipulation algorithms.
By bringing the OpenClaw team in-house, OpenAI would gain not only specialized engineering talent but also a foundation of tools and intellectual property that could accelerate its own robotics development timeline. Acqui-hires have become a favored mechanism in the AI industry for rapidly onboarding expertise without the complexity of a full corporate acquisition. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have all executed similar deals in recent months to bolster their AI capabilities across various domains.
OpenAI’s Robotics History: From Dactyl to Departure and Back Again
OpenAI’s relationship with robotics is a complicated one. The organization made headlines in 2018 and 2019 with Dactyl, a robotic hand trained entirely in simulation using reinforcement learning that could solve a Rubik’s Cube with remarkable dexterity. The project was considered a landmark achievement, demonstrating that techniques honed in virtual environments could transfer to physical hardware — a concept known as sim-to-real transfer.
But in 2021, OpenAI disbanded its robotics team, with leadership concluding that the field lacked sufficient training data to make meaningful progress at scale. At the time, the company was pouring resources into what would become GPT-4 and its successors, and the decision to exit robotics was framed as a matter of focus and resource allocation. Several members of the original robotics team went on to found or join startups, including Covariant, which was later acqui-hired by Amazon. The irony of OpenAI now seeking to rebuild robotics capabilities it once shed has not been lost on industry observers.
The Physical AI Gold Rush Reshaping the Industry
OpenAI’s renewed interest in robotics does not exist in a vacuum. The past 18 months have seen an extraordinary surge of investment and corporate activity in the physical AI space. Nvidia has positioned its Omniverse and Isaac platforms as foundational infrastructure for training robotic systems. Google DeepMind has been advancing its RT-2 and related models that allow robots to interpret natural language commands and execute physical tasks. Tesla continues to develop its Optimus humanoid robot, and a wave of well-funded startups — including Figure AI, 1X Technologies, and Skild AI — have collectively raised billions of dollars to build general-purpose robotic intelligence.
The thesis underpinning this wave of investment is straightforward: the same transformer architectures and scaling laws that produced breakthroughs in language and vision models can be applied to robotic control, particularly when combined with massive simulation-generated datasets. Foundation models for robotics — sometimes called “robot foundation models” — promise to give machines the ability to generalize across tasks and environments in ways that traditional, narrowly programmed robots cannot. OpenAI, with its deep expertise in foundation models and its vast computational resources, is arguably better positioned than almost any other organization to pursue this vision.
The Strategic Calculus Behind the OpenClaw Deal
For OpenAI, the timing of the OpenClaw discussions is significant for several reasons. The company recently closed a massive funding round that valued it at $300 billion, giving it an enormous war chest to pursue new research directions. It has also been restructuring its corporate governance, transitioning from its original nonprofit structure to a more conventional for-profit entity — a change that gives it greater flexibility to make strategic investments and acquisitions.
Moreover, OpenAI has been signaling its physical AI ambitions through other channels. The company has been expanding its partnerships with hardware manufacturers and exploring how its multimodal models — which can process text, images, audio, and video — might serve as the cognitive backbone for robotic systems. An acqui-hire of the OpenClaw team would fit neatly into this broader strategy, providing a dedicated group of robotics specialists who can bridge the gap between OpenAI’s powerful AI models and the messy, unpredictable realities of the physical world.
Acqui-Hires as the New M&A in Artificial Intelligence
The OpenClaw discussions also reflect a broader trend in how AI companies are assembling talent. Traditional acquisitions in the technology sector involve purchasing a company’s assets, revenue streams, and customer relationships. Acqui-hires, by contrast, are primarily about people — bringing in a cohesive team with specialized skills and shared working relationships. In the current AI talent market, where experienced researchers and engineers command extraordinary compensation packages and are in desperately short supply, acqui-hires offer a way to onboard entire functional teams in a single transaction.
This approach has become particularly prevalent in the AI sector over the past year. Amazon’s absorption of key talent from Adept AI and its deal involving Covariant’s robotics team are prominent examples. Microsoft’s complex arrangement with Inflection AI, in which it hired most of the startup’s staff including co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, set a template that others have followed. These deals often raise questions about antitrust implications — the Federal Trade Commission has scrutinized several such arrangements — but they continue to proliferate because they solve an acute talent bottleneck that pure hiring cannot address.
What Comes Next for OpenAI’s Robotics Push
If the OpenClaw deal closes as expected, the immediate question will be how OpenAI integrates the team and what products or research directions emerge. The open-source ethos of OpenClaw could create tension within OpenAI, which has faced persistent criticism for moving away from its original commitment to open research. Whether OpenAI continues to support OpenClaw’s open-source tools or folds them into proprietary development will be closely watched by the robotics research community.
More broadly, the deal would position OpenAI as a direct competitor to Google DeepMind, Nvidia, and a host of well-capitalized startups in the race to build general-purpose robotic intelligence. The stakes are enormous: McKinsey has estimated that automation and robotics could generate trillions of dollars in economic value over the coming decades, and the company that cracks general-purpose robotic manipulation could capture a significant share of that value. For OpenAI, the path back to robotics is not just a research curiosity — it is a potentially transformative business opportunity that aligns with its stated mission to build artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity.
As reported by The Information, the talks are advanced but not yet finalized, and the terms of any arrangement remain unclear. But the direction of travel is unmistakable: OpenAI is betting that the future of AI is not just digital, but physical — and it is assembling the team to prove it.
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