Is Meta building humanoid robot to rival Tesla's Optimus?

Meta has acquired Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI), a startup building AI systems that enable humanoid machines to anticipate and respond to human behaviour the latest move in an accelerating corporate race to own the physical AI layer of the next computing platform. Financial terms were not disclosed.

ARI was founded by Xiaolong Wang, Xuxin Cheng, and Lerrel Pinto three researchers with deep roots in academic and industrial robotics. Wang previously worked on chip design at Nvidia before joining the University of California, San Diego as a faculty member.

Pinto held a professorship at New York University and co-founded Fauna Robotics, a startup producing child-sized humanoid robots that Amazon acquired last month before Pinto departed to start ARI.

The startup had secured seed funding from AIX Ventures, though the amount was not made public. Its entire team is now moving into Meta's Superintelligence Labs, the division overseeing the company's most advanced AI research.

In a post on X, Wang said ARI's work was always aimed at building "a truly general-purpose physical agent" one that would be humanoid in form and would learn "directly from human experience."

A Meta spokesperson told Bloomberg that ARI brings expertise in designing models for "whole-body humanoid control" and self-supervised learning capabilities Meta has identified as central to its robotics ambitions.

Internal documents from 2025 revealed the company was already developing a consumer robot combining custom hardware with AI software, and CTO Andrew Bosworth has publicly described the software layer as "the bottleneck" in the entire field.

Bosworth's stated approach mirrors Meta's strategy in mobile: build licensable software modelled on what Google did with Android starting with dexterous hand control and expanding outward.

Amazon absorbed Fauna Robotics Pinto's prior company within the past month to bolster its own robot workforce programme.

Tesla, meanwhile has stopped production of its Model S and Model X vehicles earlier this year, converting the floor space at its Fremont factory to manufacture Optimus humanoid robots at scale.