Anthropic held $11B buyout talks with Physical Intelligence before denial

The rumor that spread like wildfire over the weekend—that Anthropic was acquiring robotics unicorn Physical Intelligence—wasn’t just smoke. According to The Information, the two actually held acquisition talks this spring. Physical Intelligence CEO Karol Hausman killed the chatter with a Slack message containing an ‘Office’ gif, but the fact that conversations happened at all exposes a frantic new front in the AI arms race: the physical world.

This isn’t about warehouse automation. For frontier labs, robot data is increasingly seen as a missing piece for building systems with genuine superintelligence. You can’t learn how the world works from internet text alone. Anthropic’s own research backs this up. Its Project Fetch experiments showed Claude 3.5 Sonnet could guide a robot dog through tasks, and a newer model completed them 20 times faster than the best human-plus-AI team from the year before. Buying a team with a working robot brain like Physical Intelligence’s π0.5 model would let Anthropic skip years of messy hardware iteration.

The plot thickens because OpenAI is already an investor in Physical Intelligence, alongside Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital, and reportedly Founders Fund. That makes Sam Altman’s company a stakeholder in a startup its chief rival tried to buy. It also raises the uncomfortable question of whether OpenAI’s early check came with information rights or a right of first refusal—the kind of provision that could kill a competitor’s deal before it starts. OpenAI didn’t respond to questions about that.

Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1, with OpenAI following a week later. Both are sprinting toward public markets while racing to extend their models beyond screens. Robotics is the obvious next battleground, and Physical Intelligence, which was in talks for another $1 billion round at an $11 billion valuation, sits right in the middle of it. The denial closed the door for now, but in a year where both labs are stockpiling assets ahead of Wall Street debuts, don’t expect it to stay shut.