- OpenAI is actively hiring robotics engineers as it revives its robotics ambitions, with an initial focus on robots that can help build data centres, power grids, and other critical infrastructure.
- The move marks OpenAI’s strongest robotics push since shutting down its robotics team in 2021. Since then, it has backed robotics startups including 1X Technologies and Figure AI.
- Long term, Sam Altman envisions a future where everyone has a personal robot, but the renewed robotics effort also raises fresh questions around safety, autonomy, and real-world AI deployment.
Sam Altman spent years making AI useful for people who sit at desks. Now he wants to make it useful for people who build things.
On May 31, Altman posted on X that OpenAI Robotics is actively hiring, seeking “exceptional full-stack hardware, ops, systems, and ML engineers to help us program and manufacture robots that are useful for society.” Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s co-founder and president, followed up to confirm the division is “making rapid progress towards building AI that can help people in the physical world.”
The near-term focus, per Altman, is specific: robots to support skilled workers building infrastructure. Not household helpers, not warehouse sorters, construction and physical build-out, the workforce that will need to wire, pour, and assemble the data centres, power grids, and factories that the AI boom demands. The long-term vision, Altman added, is “everyone having a personal robot doing anything they need.”
This is not OpenAI’s first attempt at robotics. The company ran a robotic hand project called Dactyl from 2017, most notably solving a Rubik’s Cube one-handed in 2019, before disbanding the entire robotics team in 2021 and pivoting into the language model business.
It has since maintained a foothold through minority investments – the OpenAI Startup Fund led a $23.5 million round for 1X Technologies in 2023, a company that has since opened America’s first vertically integrated humanoid factory in Hayward, California. The same fund joined the $675 million round for Figure AI alongside Microsoft, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos – though Figure subsequently ended its collaboration with OpenAI in February 2025 to build its AI models entirely in-house. But this hiring push marks the most explicit public commitment to building proprietary robotics capability rather than simply funding others to do it.
OpenAI’s robotics hardware lead Caitlin Kalinowski, who joined from Meta in November 2024 resigned on March 7, 2026, citing concerns about the company’s Pentagon deal and the lack of guardrails around domestic surveillance and lethal autonomy. Robotics is not just another product category for OpenAI. It is where its most contested questions about safety, power, and autonomy will be answered in the physical world, not on a chat interface.
