Anthropic’s Robot Ambition; Nvidia Ramps Up Vera Rubin

Over the weekend, tech blogger Robert Scoble claimed Anthropic was in the process of acquiring Physical Intelligence, an AI robotics software developer that was most recently in talks to raise capital at a valuation of $11 billion. Scoble’s claim sent X into a frenzy.

Scoble may not be right, as Physical Intelligence CEO Karol Hausman denied to employees that anything was afoot—in a slack message, he shared a gif of a character from The Office shaking her head ‘no,’ according to someone who saw the message. But Scoble’s claim also wasn’t totally off base: Anthropic and Physical Intelligence in fact had early acquisition talks this spring, but didn’t end up going further, according to someone who spoke with Physical Intelligence executives.

Such a move might seem surprising, as Anthropic has so far been pretty good at staying focused on coding and enterprise AI. But the idea makes some sense. Some researchers believe AI must understand real-world physics to be considered truly superintelligent. Even after reading all the text on the internet, AI models still struggle with basic spatial reasoning tasks because they don’t have that real-world experience, for instance.