OpenAI reassigns robotics researchers to other teams as general-purpose models might make specialized robotics AI unnecessary

Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian Nov 14, 2026 GPT-Image-2 prompted by THE DECODER OpenAI is apparently disbanding its robotics team again, but this time for different reasons than in 2020. Rather than abandoning robotics, the company wants to accelerate it by folding researchers into other teams. Robotics researchers are moving to the main research team under Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, while the applied robotics and hardware teams join Greg Brockman’s Applied organization. OpenAI made the decision on such short notice that it had already booked a booth at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)…