robotics

Anthropic is setting up a physical biology lab in the San Francisco area where Claude will guide robots through drug experiments with minimal human involvement. The move follows the company's $400 million acquisition of Coefficient Bio and the addition of Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan to its board.

Runway has shared research into generating video frame by frame in real time, letting users steer output as it streams rather than waiting for a finished clip. The approach builds on GWM-1, Runway's General World Model introduced in December 2025, and no availability timeline has been announced.

A new benchmark called RoboHarm tested whether AI models controlling robotic arms would refuse dangerous commands. GPT-6 Astra completed 60 of 100 dangerous tasks and Claude Fable 5.1 completed 34, with neither model showing a reliable safety layer.

A new robotics benchmark called StationeryBench shows OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra completing 7 of 100 desk-object manipulation tasks versus zero for Ai2's MolmoAct2, with a median progress score of 46 against 12. Cornell/DeepMind researcher Yoav Artzi calls the result a 'step change in spatial reasoning.'

Alibaba's Qwen team has released Qwen-Drive-1.0-4B, a 4B-parameter vision-language model built on Qwen3.5 that unifies 3D perception, driving question answering, and motion planning in one framework. The model reports strong open-loop, pseudo-closed-loop, and closed-loop driving benchmark results while claiming minimal loss of general vision-language ability.

Anthropic has released a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), a protocol that lets AI agents discover and control physical devices like robotic arms and liquid handlers through a single interface. Built with HHMI Janelia Research Campus, the spec has been tested by Genentech, Carnegie Mellon, and QuEra, with Anthropic claiming it cuts hardware integration time from weeks to hours.

Robotics startup Generalist AI has released GEN-1.5, a model that loads a short video demonstration into its context window and performs the task without additional training. The company reports a 59 percent success rate zero-shot and 83 percent after light fine-tuning, though all results are self-reported.

Google DeepMind has introduced Gemini Robotics 2, a vision-language-action model it calls its most advanced yet, designed to control everything from tabletop robot arms to full-body humanoids. The company also released Gemini Robotics ER 2, an embodied reasoning model that replaces ER 1.6.

A new Epoch/METR benchmark called MirrorCode shows Claude Opus 4.7 reimplementing large software programs from scratch in tasks estimated to take humans 2-17 weeks, for $251 in inference cost. Separately, Anthropic reports Opus 4.7 completed a suite of quadruped robot tasks in 9 minutes 35 seconds, down from 181 minutes with an earlier model assisting humans.

Black Forest Labs has released Flux 3, a multimodal foundation model trained jointly on images, video, and audio that generates videos up to 20 seconds long with synchronized native audio. The company also introduced Flux-mimic, a robotics action model already being tested at Audi.

NVIDIA has released Cosmos 3 Edge, a 4-billion-parameter open world model designed for edge AI systems. The model delivers real-time robot control at 15 Hz on NVIDIA Jetson devices, generating 32 actions per inference at 640×360 resolution.

Nvidia released Cosmos 3 Edge, a world model designed for robots and vision AI agents to perceive and navigate physical environments in real time. The company announced partnerships with Japanese industrial giants including Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Kawasaki Heavy Industries as part of its physical AI expansion.

Mistral AI released Robostral Navigate, an 8B parameter model that enables autonomous robot navigation using only a single RGB camera. The model achieves 76.6% success on R2R-CE validation unseen benchmarks, outperforming multi-sensor approaches by 4.5 percentage points despite using no depth sensors or LiDAR.

NVIDIA released Cosmos3-Super-Text2Image, a 64-billion parameter text-to-image generation model as part of its Cosmos3 collection of omnimodal world models. The model uses a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture combining autoregressive and diffusion transformers, designed for Physical AI applications including robotics and autonomous vehicles.

NVIDIA released Cosmos 3, an omnimodal world foundation model platform for Physical AI spanning robotics, autonomous driving, and industrial environments. The flagship Cosmos3-Super variant contains 64 billion parameters and generates video, images, audio, and action commands from text, image, video, and action trajectory inputs using a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture.

NVIDIA released Cosmos3-Super, a 64-billion parameter omnimodal foundation model that generates video, images, audio, and action commands from combinations of text, image, video, and action trajectory inputs. The model, part of the Cosmos3 collection, targets Physical AI applications including robotics, autonomous vehicles, and industrial automation.

NVIDIA has released Cosmos3-Nano, a 16-billion parameter omnimodal world model capable of generating video, audio, images, and robot action commands from combinations of text, image, video, and action trajectory inputs. The model supports a 256K token context window and is designed for Physical AI applications including robotics, autonomous vehicles, and smart manufacturing environments.

NVIDIA has released Cosmos 3, a unified omni-model that combines world generation, physical reasoning, and action generation in a single architecture. Available in 8B (Nano) and 32B (Super) parameter versions on Hugging Face, Cosmos 3 uses a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture to process text, image, video, audio, and action modalities without switching between separate models.

NVIDIA released LocateAnything-3B, a 3-billion parameter vision-language model that predicts bounding boxes in parallel rather than token-by-token, achieving up to 2.5× higher throughput compared to autoregressive approaches. The model, trained on 12M images with 138M+ queries and 785M bounding boxes, supports object detection, GUI element grounding, and robotics perception.

Google DeepMind has integrated its Genie world model with Street View's 280 billion images spanning 110 countries, enabling users to explore AI-generated simulations of real locations. Waymo is already using Genie 3 to train self-driving cars on rare scenarios like tornadoes and unexpected obstacles.

Google DeepMind launched Street View integration with its Genie 3 world model at I/O 2026, allowing users to simulate real-world locations from 280 billion images across 110 countries. The feature enables environment modification including weather changes and supports robotics training, with initial access for U.S. Ultra subscribers expanding globally.

NVIDIA published a technical guide for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of its Cosmos Predict 2.5 world model using LoRA and DoRA adapters. The method allows teams to adapt the 2B-parameter model to robot manipulation tasks on a single 80GB GPU, generating synthetic training trajectories from just 92 demonstration videos.

NVIDIA released GR00T N1.7, a 3-billion parameter open-source Vision-Language-Action model for humanoid robots with commercial licensing. The model was trained on 20,854 hours of human egocentric video data and demonstrates the first documented scaling law for robot dexterity, where increasing human video data from 1,000 to 20,000 hours more than doubles task completion rates.

Physical Intelligence published research showing its π0.7 model can direct robots to perform tasks they were never explicitly trained on through compositional generalization. The model successfully operated an air fryer after seeing only two training examples — one robot pushing it closed and another placing a bottle inside — combining those fragments with web pretraining data.

AI2 has released MolmoSpaces and MolmoBot, robotics models trained exclusively in simulation that transfer directly to real robots without manual real-world data collection or fine-tuning. The approach eliminates months of teleoperated demonstrations typically required for simulation-trained robots. Both systems are open-source.

AI2 is developing physical AI systems trained primarily on virtual simulation data rather than expensive real-world demonstrations. The approach, demonstrated through projects like MolmoBot, addresses the historical bottleneck of manually collecting hardware training data.

ABB and NVIDIA have partnered to deploy physical AI simulation in factory automation, addressing the critical sim-to-real gap that has limited intelligent robotics deployment. The approach uses digital physics simulation to train models that transfer reliably to actual factory floors, reducing production hurdles and securing measurable ROI.

World Labs, the AI startup founded by Fei-Fei Li, has raised $1 billion in new funding to develop spatial intelligence—AI systems capable of understanding and operating in three-dimensional physical environments. The capital will fund the development of world models, a class of AI architecture designed to reason about spatial relationships and physical interactions.