OpenAI disbands stand-alone robotics team, moves researchers under Mark Chen

OpenAI has disbanded its stand-alone robotics team, Fortune reported on Nov. 13, 2026, and the company confirmed the change. Robotics researchers move to the main research team under Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, while applied robotics and hardware teams move to the Applied organization under President Greg Brockman. OpenAI says it is not leaving robotics, and CEO Sam Altman's target of a first public humanoid demo in 2027 still stands, per Fortune and TokenPost.

Reorganization details

A spokesperson told Fortune that general frontier models, including GPT-6 Astra, have shown they can be applied directly to robots. It is OpenAI's second reset: it wound down a robotics team in 2020 and rebuilt one in 2024 alongside a Figure partnership that ended in February 2025. Fortune found OpenAI's registered CoRL booth, No. 208, empty this week.

NVIDIA study on GPT-6 Astra

In NVIDIA's Oct. 14 Astranomy study, the one Fortune cites, GPT-6 Astra in its best agent setup succeeded on 74.8% of 120 simulated general-purpose pick-and-place and manipulation tasks, against 51.0% for the top specialized policy. NVIDIA put that setup at $36.40 in tokens per episode, or about $48.66 per success by Servospace's math. Its direct mode cost $1.96 per episode, with model calls averaging 18.56 seconds. All of it was in simulation, paused while the model thought.

Experts and hardware plans

MIT professor Russ Tedrake, CEO of Walden Robotics, told Fortune that deployment data gets more valuable as base models improve. CMU's Guanya Shi told Fortune small onboard models are still needed when a robot cannot wait on the cloud. OpenAI's public job board listed 15 openings under Robotics on Nov. 13, all in San Francisco and mostly hardware roles in actuators, motors, circuit boards and firmware. The newest was posted Nov. 12, while Engadget counted 27 robotics openings on Oct. 17. Job boards move, and the gap is not evidence of a headcount cut.

What the shift could mean

Servospace analysis says the robot brain is becoming a feature of the frontier model, the way coding and legal tools run on the same models. If that holds, startups selling a separate robot foundation model face a bigger rival on intelligence, and humanoid makers may get another general-purpose brain to buy or license instead of build, if OpenAI sells robotics access. OpenAI has not announced a robotics license.

Sources: Servospace · Fortune · Techmeme