It’s been a big year for AI acquisitions, so big that most of them barely register. Anthropic and OpenAI have continued to buy, acquiring developer tools, AI service shops, and product testing startups to turn model capability into enterprise revenue and expand their reach faster than each other. Which is what made the weekend rumor about robotics startup Physical Intelligence’s acquisition of Anthropic stand out. It spread extremely quickly, even after a denial from the CEO of Physical Intelligence.

Part of that has to do with who is involved. Physical Intelligence is not an obscure robotics store. It was co-founded by Lachy Groom, an investor-operator whose star has been rising in Silicon Valley in recent years; has raised more than $1 billion (and was reportedly in talks this spring for another $1 billion round at an $11 billion valuation); and its π0.5 model is apparently among the most widely used robot brains in robotics research.

It turns out that the rumor was not entirely false. In fact, Anthropic and Physical Intelligence held acquisition talks this spring, according to The Information, so tech blogger Robert Scoble (whose weekend post on X sparked the frenzy) may have been wrong about the details without being wrong that anything had happened.

It should be noted that Physical Intelligence’s response to the rumors was not the most vigorous denial in the world. According to The Information, Physical Intelligence CEO Karol Hausman told employees that the reports were not true via a Slack message that contained a gif of a “The Office” character shaking his head.

Groom, for his part, did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment sent late Monday.

Anthropic has made four known acquisitions this year; OpenAI has been more aggressive, acquiring at least 17 companies since 2023. Both, of course, are now also preparing to go public. Anthropic confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on June 1, followed by OpenAI a week later, setting up what could be two of the biggest US stock market debuts in history.

So why robotics and why now? The most likely answer is that understanding the physical world may be a prerequisite for superintelligent systems, and no Internet text can replace it.

OpenAI’s own history here is instructive. It built an early robotic hand that could solve a Rubik’s cube, then shut down the entire robotics group in 2021, and co-founder Wojciech Zaremba later said the approach was missing pieces necessary 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 that “OpenAI Robotics” was hiring and outlining a short-term focus on robots for infrastructure jobs, with a personal robot for everyone as a long-term goal.

Anthropic hasn’t built anything like OpenAI’s hardware lab. What it has done is publish a series of research articles through its internal group that test border capabilities for security purposes. That included Project Fetch last November, where Anthropic staff tested how much Claude could help non-experts program a robot dog, and a second phase in June that Anthropic said found a newer model completed the same tasks about 20 times faster than the best human-plus-Claude team from the previous year.

Buying an existing team with robotics expertise would allow Anthropic to skip years of work. However, there is a possible complication. Physical Intelligence was founded in San Francisco about two years ago by Groom, former Google researchers and Stanford and Berkeley professors, and its early investor base looks a lot like OpenAI’s, including Khosla Ventures and Thrive Capital. Founders Fund, also a major OpenAI investor, reportedly participated in Physical Intelligence’s most recent funding round earlier this year.

In fact, OpenAI is itself an investor in Physical Intelligence, so it is not just a peripheral player; is an interested party in a company that its main rival was reportedly in talks to buy very recently.

This raises questions about whether OpenAI’s initial investment came with any right of information or a right of first refusal on a sale to a competitor, the kind of protective provisions that large strategic investors sometimes negotiate for precisely this scenario.

That leaves open the possibility that, if Physical Intelligence is really at play, OpenAI (which is already a shareholder, is already close to Groom, and is already trying to make sure it surpasses Anthropic in robotics) may have a more obvious claim than Anthropic. We asked OpenAI these questions today and the company did not respond.