Sam Altman spent years making artificial intelligence useful for people sitting at computers. Now he wants to do the same for people who physically build the world around us. He posted a brief announcement on X: OpenAI Robotics is hiring. It is looking for exceptional engineers across hardware, machine learning, systems, and operations. The goal? To program and manufacture robots that will be genuinely useful to society. Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, soon confirmed that the division is “rapidly moving forward with building artificial intelligence capable of helping people in the physical world.”
Open positions
The recruitment drive has expanded to at least eleven positions based in San Francisco. And the list reveals a great deal. A 3D printer technician, an actuator design engineer, a data collection specialist, an electrical engineer for robotic systems, and a simulation environments engineer.
The electrical engineer position, for example, covers the entire hardware development lifecycle, from initial prototypes through circuit design, component selection, and printed circuit board layout to testing and deployment. The salary ranges from $210,000 to $310,000 per year, plus equity. Employees are required to work in the office in person four days a week.
The data collection engineer, meanwhile, designs the physical stations where robots train, including their fixtures, operator controls, and safety mechanisms. And the simulation environments specialist builds tools that allow researchers to create and test virtual environments for robotics at scale.
Together, these positions paint a picture of a company building its own backbone for collecting physical data, testing hardware, and connecting model training with robot behavior in the real world.
OpenAI’s return to robotics
This is not the first attempt. OpenAI had a robotics team as early as 2017. Project Dactyl, a robotic hand that solved a Rubik’s Cube with one hand in 2019, received considerable media attention at the time. Two years later, the company disbanded the entire team. The reason was that the company had concluded it did not have enough real-world data to train useful systems at a larger scale.
Since then, the situation has changed dramatically. Language and vision models are substantially more powerful, sensors are cheaper, and simulation tools have advanced. Meanwhile, humanoid robotics has transformed from a research curiosity into an active commercial category attracting billions in investment.
OpenAI maintained a presence in the industry through minority investments. In 2023, the OpenAI Startup Fund led a $23.5 million funding round for 1X Technologies, which now operates the first U.S. humanoid robot factory in California. The same fund also participated in a $675 million round for Figure AI alongside Microsoft, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos. However, in February 2025, Figure AI ended its collaboration with OpenAI and began developing its own AI models.
Now OpenAI is moving beyond merely funding others and is beginning to build its own capabilities.
OpenAI’s goals in the industry
In his announcement, Altman explicitly described what the division is focusing on. In the short term, the aim is to develop robots that support skilled workers in building infrastructure—that is, the data centers, power grids, and factories required by the AI boom itself. The long-term vision is different. Altman writes about everyone being able to acquire a personal robot that can do anything.
There is also an organizational background behind this outlook: the world simulation research program led by Aditya Ramesh evolved over the past year into what is now OpenAI Robotics. According to Altman, development is progressing rapidly and is based on the simultaneous design of robotic hardware and machine learning research.
OpenAI Robotics is hiring, looking for exceptional full-stack hardware, ops, systems, and ML engineers to help us program and manufacture robots that are useful for society.
— Sam Altman (@sama) May 31, 2026
AI should be able to help people in the physical world. In the short term, we are focused on robots to…
At the same time that Altman announced the recruitment drive, Nvidia unveiled the RTX Spark chip at Computex 2026, a new Arm-based processor designed for laptops with an emphasis on artificial intelligence. Microsoft, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and MSI confirmed that they are preparing their own laptops based on it.
More powerful AI chips in personal devices, robots capable of working in the physical world, and models trained on data from real environments. Major technology companies are moving into physical reality from two different directions, and it seems they will soon meet there.
The shadow of a departure and questions about safety
However, OpenAI’s robotics recruitment drive is not generating enthusiasm alone. Caitlin Kalinowski, who joined from Meta in November 2024 as head of robotics hardware, resigned on March 7, 2026. She left over concerns about OpenAI’s agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense and the absence of safeguards governing the use of the technology for domestic surveillance and lethal autonomous systems.
Her departure casts a shadow over the new team’s technical and organizational ambitions. Robotics is not like a chatbot. Systems that physically exist in the world bring different risks and raise different questions than a text model on a screen. OpenAI will have to fill the robotics hardware leadership position again while also demonstrating that it has answers to these questions.
Figure AI, 1X, Tesla, Agility Robotics, and Physical Intelligence now face a new competitor in the market for talent. Engineers with experience in calibration, sensor fusion, real-time control, and data pipelines for robots are in high demand. By entering this field, OpenAI is driving compensation higher and making recruitment more difficult across the industry.
Sources: openai.com and firstpost.com
