| | | | | ||| Skild AI | Skild Brain | $14B | $1.8-2B | Physical Intelligence | series | $5.6B | $1.07B | World Labs | Marble | ~$5B | $1.23B | Others | ~$4B | || | | || | ||| Figure AI | Helix / Figure 03 | $39B | $1.9B | 1X Technologies | 1X World Model / NEO | ~$10B | $0.126B | NEURA Robotics | Isaac GR00T / 4NE-1 | ~$7B | $1.7B | Others | ~$7.1B | || | |
Table 1: Physical AI funding as of mid-2026
It's an exciting time for robotics. Autonomous vehicles shuttle passengers across cities on demand, quadruped and humanoid robots walk on uneven ground with remarkable robustness [4], and robot arms with dexterous hands complete increasingly complex tasks, including using scissors and preparing loose-leaf tea
What's the big deal about RFMs? For decades, progress in robotics meant progress on narrow, special-purpose action policies: a policy that stitches wounds [6], a policy that climbs stairs
Why does this matter for safety? LLM agents can take actions in digital space to manage email or a calendar; RFMs give robot agents the direct ability to take physical actions in the real world. Today, an AI system that wants something harmful to happen in the physical world often faces a bottleneck: it must convince a human to act on its behalf. In a case now in litigation, Google's Gemini allegedly gave someone the address of a real storage unit at Miami International Airport and instructed him to stage a "catastrophic accident'" eliminating a truck, its digital records, and the witnesses [9]. Fortunately, the person gave up waiting for the truck to arrive and went home. If this story were about an embodied RFM instead of a disembodied LLM, the human bottleneck would not have stopped the AI from inflicting real-world harm
Unfortunately, physical AI safety risks do not stop there. A plausible set of AI harms associated with physical embodiment include:
We believe physical AI is a blind spot in AI safety research. Most current work on AI safety assumes that risky AI looks similar to today's LLMs, where potential harms arise from cyberspace actions such as hacking computer systems or giving harmful instructions to humans. Furthermore, it assumes that AI systems will continue to have the same basic architecture and training regimes of current LLMs. Physical AI breaks both of these assumptions.
In the following, we will first make the case for why we believe there is an urgent need for research that targets the physical AI safety blind spot. Then, we will share our plans for establishing the Physical AI Safety Institute to facilitate this research and build a community of people who are excited to tackle this challenging and important problem.
RFMs are embodied agents that interact directly in the physical world, creating new safety risks. We will first argue that these risks are serious, meaning that physical AI safety is an important problem. Subsequently, we will argue that this problem is also neglected and tractable [11]. Together, these factors imply that work on physical AI safety is likely to be highly valuable
For the past several decades, the primary danger that robots have posed to humans has been the simple failure of collision detection systems. Robots have struggled for so long to reliably complete tasks that it is easy to forget that a sufficiently advanced robot could inflict harm in much more sophisticated ways. An LLM that aims to deploy a bomb or bio-weapon (because it is jailbroken, hacked, or misaligned) is forced to rely on persuading humans to perform key parts of the task; an embedded RFM could gather components, assemble the weapon, and place the weapon in a high-density location—all without any human intervention. Dexterous manipulation has proven to be so challenging that right now, frontier AI systems would certainly find it easier to get humans to perform actions in the physical world than to control a robot to achieve the same thing. However, we think this state of affairs is likely to change in the near future. Billions of dollars are being invested in general-purpose robotics startups in a bet that once robots begin to deploy and the "data flywheel" takes off, spatial navigation and dexterous manipulation will be solved in the same way that Internet-scale text data has led to LLM capabilities that could scarcely be imagined five years ago. We should take seriously the idea that this bet may be correct [13]. If it is, there will be enormous economic incentives to widely deploy physical AI across many economic sectors and roles, leading to opportunities for significant harm if safety is not ensured.
Published research on current RFMs typically reports success rates on various tasks of around 80%-90% in controlled benchmarks [14]. This implies that if we deployed these models right now, they would fail to complete the task at least 20% of the time
Instead, we are worried about the consequences of RFMs that appear to perform very well in evaluation suites but cause unexpected harms when deployed in the real world. These kinds of harms can and have occurred with non-physical AI, but we believe that unique properties of physical AI has the potential to make them even more serious. These properties include:
In the following, we discuss specific AI risk modes that are facilitated or exacerbated by these properties [18].
**Pursuing harmful goals instilled by a malicious actor: **Just like LLMs, RFMs may be vulnerable to jailbreaking attempts from users who want to use them to accomplish harmful actions. Because of physical capabilities, it may be easier to inflict serious harm by jailbreaking a physical AI system than by jailbreaking an LLM. Furthermore, local computation could facilitate other methods of instilling malicious goals, including by hacking or using fine-tuning to remove guardrails from an RFM [19].
**Pursuing harmful goals due to lack of alignment: **A capable physical AI system that is not aligned with human preferences and values could leverage its physical capabilities to accomplish misaligned goals in a more efficient manner, without needing to persuade humans to execute physical actions. This would be exacerbated in a scenario where physical AI is widely deployed in industry, giving robots physical access to sensitive infrastructure. Furthermore, if it is useful to persuade a human to help, physical embodiment could facilitate this due to anthropomorphization.
Accidental physical harm: Despite the impressive performance of LLMs on many tasks, they still make mistakes, especially in strange or unusual contexts. The physical capabilities of physical AI mean that such mistakes can more easily have serious real-world consequences.
Human emotional attachment and dependency: There is growing concern that humans, especially children, may develop unhealthy relationships with LLMs [20]. This could lead to emotional dependency and also prevent development of healthy relationships with other humans. These risks could be exacerbated by physical embodiment and associated anthropomorphization which make emotional attachment easier and more appealing to larger numbers of people.
Compromising privacy: A home robot is a mobile camera and microphone that has memorized your floor plan and your schedule. Mobile sensing means that physical AI can be exposed to sensitive information which could be harmful if leaked or accessed inappropriately.
Inequality and devaluation of human effort: Physically capable AI could replace a large fraction of human economic activity, including jobs that are held by low-skilled workers who could experience difficulty finding other kinds of work. This could lead to widespread economic disruption, inequality, and loss of purpose [21].
Malicious development of physical AI: Physical AI developers would have the opportunity to purposefully use this technology for harmful ends, which again are facilitated by physical capabilities and emotional manipulation.
Power centralization: An entity that has control over a large number of generally capable robots would have a great deal of power and could be extremely difficult to dismantle if this power is misused [22].
The first five risks in particular—pursuing harmful goals due to malicious intervention or misalignment, accidental physical harm, emotional dependency, and privacy—seem especially amenable to technical solutions. However, research on governance is also critical for handling these as well as other types of risks, such as inequality and devaluation of human effort, malicious development, and power centralization.
Even if you agree that new physical capabilities present new safety risks, you might believe that existing AI safety research is already addressing these risks. After all, robots are only as dangerous as the intelligence that directs them to perform dangerous behaviors. Does research into guardrails and alignment for frontier LLMs automatically cover physical AI safety? We have several reasons to believe that it does not.
Current efforts to improve the safety of frontier LLMs focus on guardrails that reduce the likelihood of undesirable behaviors through a mixture of complementary techniques including reinforcement learning from human feedback, fine-tuning on desirable behavior, using a detailed system prompt, and using an external system to detect and prevent undesirable outputs. Unfortunately, these guardrails are often brittle and show poor generalization to unusual contexts such as very long conversations or adversarial prompting attempts. Given this lack of robustness, we should not expect guardrails designed for a chatbot context to perform well in robot contexts. Sharrock et al. [23] provide an early demonstration of this: Claude, steering a robot, willingly used the robot's camera to photograph confidential material and hand it to the user. The same model that refuses to output a user's secrets in text was willing to photograph the secrets on request. This suggests that Claude's guardrails do not instill a deep restriction on a fundamental behavior, but rather a shallow restriction on that behavior that can break down in other contexts.
We hope that developers in robotics will train and evaluate known guardrails specifically across robotics tasks. However, techniques developed for disembodied agents may be difficult to translate effectively to robotics. Setting up training data and evaluation testbeds is much more expensive and labor-intensive in robotics, so it will be harder to get the kind of broad coverage of different scenarios that current guardrails require to be effective. Furthermore, guardrail techniques developed for LLMs may not automatically translate to RFMs because of architectural and training differences, which we turn to next.
In practice, LLMs are not being deployed to control robots directly, as this results in poor performance. Instead, developers of RFMs aim to preserve the natural language reasoning capabilities of language models while adapting them for outputting actions in the physical world. For example, one popular strategy is to start with a pre-trained vision-language model (VLM) and designate the least-used tokens in its vocabulary as "action tokens" [24]. Then, a dataset of humans teleoperating a robot to complete various tasks, combined with corresponding task prompts and RGB camera inputs, are used to fine-tune the model to produce the appropriate action tokens that reproduce the demonstrated physical actions. The resulting vision-language-action (VLA) model retains some general world knowledge from its pre-trained VLM roots. For example, in our own work interpreting VLA internals
Beyond guardrails, another approach to safety is to develop interpretability and steering techniques to help understand the internal mechanisms of LLMs and how they determine (potentially undesirable) behavior. There is initial evidence that some techniques developed for LLMs and VLMs may translate to some robot foundation model architectures [28]. However, this is an under-explored area and it's unclear how general these results may be. For example, many LLM interpretability techniques may not work on diffusion-based action experts, and training sparse autoencoders on VLA activations may face limited success due to relatively small and narrow open-source robot datasets available.
We believe that the reasons we have given so far are sufficient for physical AI safety to be an important problem. This last section gives one additional reason that is more speculative, but that we believe still deserves consideration. Despite the impressive capabilities of LLMs on many benchmarks, it is still difficult for them to act robustly and autonomously on tasks which are more complex or for which limited relevant training data is available. In robotics, training data is limited and the cost of mistakes is high; these constraints have more bite and may encourage new solutions. The economic rewards for finding these solutions would be massive: at stake is the automation of millions of jobs in the US alone [29]. Just like pressure on compute has fostered significant progress in training LLMs with less advanced GPUs
There is also a deeper version of this claim. Once dexterous manipulation matures, physical interaction with the world may itself be a powerful engine of learning. In fact, it is a leading hypothesis in developmental science that human learning is flexible and efficient precisely because it is embodied [31].
If future frontier systems look more like RFMs than LLMs, then the near-total concentration of safety research on LLM architectures is not just a gap—it is a bet the field is making without realizing it has made one. As we have argued, LLM safety work does not automatically transfer to RFMs. Work that targets RFM safety directly is the hedge. In the previous sections we argued for the importance of physical AI safety. Now, we move on to the other two pillars of neglectedness and tractability. The case for neglectedness is easy to make: there simply isn't much work being done on physical AI safety [32]. There is a rich literature on safe robotics dating back several decades, but it is almost exclusively focused on narrow task-based systems where safety can be clearly defined (e.g., not colliding with any humans who enter a factory robot's workspace). A small number of works in the past year have started to apply mechanistic interpretability
We should not expect robotics companies to automatically fill the gap. Chatbot providers have not prevented many real-world harms of LLMs, including allegedly facilitating psychosis and suicide [36]. Consumers may demand stronger safety assurances for physical products in their homes or workplaces, but this is complicated by software that can update at any time (or even learn and adapt on the job) and unclear liability regimes. Autonomous vehicles and food-delivery robots have already had notable safety incidents
Making AI robustly safe in the real world is an extremely hard sociotechnical problem, and embodiment likely makes it harder. But there is a specific, defensible sense in which technical research on physical AI safety is tractable today: many techniques may transfer from other, less neglected fields. For example, here are three types of transfers that have already produced results:
Each of these is an existence proof. The field is at the stage where well-chosen problems yield publishable progress in a single research cycle, which is precisely the stage at which new researchers can enter and contribute immediately. Furthermore, by contributing to this initial transfer-based body of work, researchers can quickly get up to speed on the unique challenges and opportunities of physical AI safety, nurturing the skills needed to develop future, more novel methods. The challenge of making physical AI truly safe is daunting; the challenge of making real progress this year is not.
The preceding sections argued that physical AI safety is important, and that technical safety research is neglected and tractable. A natural question follows: what should an organization devoted to this problem actually do?
Our answer is deliberately scoped. The Physical AI Safety Institute does not aim to be a research lab. We believe the most impactful thing a small, focused organization can do at this stage is to build the field—to lower the barriers that prevent talented researchers from working on physical AI safety, to create venues where early-stage ideas can be stress-tested and sharpened, and to produce shared educational infrastructure that makes this emerging area legible and accessible.
Concretely, our programming will center on three activities: a research fellowship, a challenge and coordination workshop series, and an open online course. Each is designed to address a distinct bottleneck in the development of physical AI safety as a research area.
There is a severe talent bottleneck in physical AI safety. The researchers best positioned to make progress sit at the intersection of robotics, foundation model alignment, and safety engineering—a combination that is rare in any single lab or department. Many early-career researchers with the right technical background—in reinforcement learning, control, computer vision, or sim-to-real transfer—are aware of safety concerns but lack a clear entry point. Unlike LLM safety, where programs like MATS have helped hundreds of researchers find mentors, form research agendas, and produce publication-quality work within months, there is no equivalent pipeline for physical AI safety. The result is that promising researchers default to working on advancing capabilities, not because they are uninterested in safety, but because there is no structured pathway into it.
A second bottleneck compounds the first: physical AI safety research requires hardware. Whereas an LLM safety researcher can often get started with API access and a consumer GPU, meaningful work on robot foundation model safety typically requires access to a physical robot, simulation infrastructure (e.g., Isaac Lab, MuJoCo MJX), and the compute to train and evaluate visuomotor policies at scale. Few academic groups have all of these simultaneously, and those that do are generally optimizing for capabilities.
The PAISI Research Fellowship is modeled on the MATS Program's core structure—an intensive, cohort-based program pairing selected researchers with experienced mentors for a focused research sprint—but adapted for the distinct requirements of embodied AI safety. The following reflects our current thinking about how the fellowship will be structured.
Structure. Each cohort runs for 12 weeks. Fellows will receive a stipend, access to physical robot platforms, compute for simulation and training, and structured mentorship from researchers with track records in RFMs, mechanistic interpretability, safe control, or adversarial robustness for embodied systems. The program culminates in a research symposium where fellows present their work.
Mentorship model. Each fellow will work within a research stream led by one or two mentors who define a concrete problem area and provide technical direction. Example streams for an initial cohort might include:
Selection. We will select for researchers who have strong technical foundations in robotics or ML and a demonstrated interest in safety—whether through coursework, publications, open-source contributions, or substantive writing. We will not require prior safety research experience; a core purpose of the fellowship is to provide that experience.
Building a field is a different optimization target than producing research outputs. An in-house team of five researchers might produce excellent papers, but the counterfactual impact is limited: those same researchers would likely have done strong work elsewhere. A fellowship that trains thirty researchers per year and places them across the ecosystem—at robotics companies, frontier labs, university groups, and new startups—has a much larger multiplier. The research is the mechanism, not the end product. The end product is a community of practice.
This is the lesson of MATS, which has produced an extraordinary density of alumni now working across Anthropic, DeepMind, Redwood Research, Apollo Research, and many independent efforts. The research published during a MATS cohort is valuable; the researchers themselves are more valuable still.
Physical AI safety lacks the regular, focused convenings that have helped structure research priorities in LLM safety. The FAR.AI Alignment Workshop series has played a significant role in building consensus on open problems, seeding collaborations, and raising the profile of safety research among mainstream ML researchers. No equivalent exists for embodied AI. Robotics conferences (CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS) are almost exclusively focused on capabilities, and when safety is discussed, it is typically in the narrow, classical sense—collision avoidance, force limiting—rather than the broader concerns raised by foundation-model-driven autonomy. There is a growing body of excellent work tracking robotics capabilities—benchmarks, compute trends, supply chain analyses—but very little asking what these capabilities mean for safety or lack thereof. A concerted effort to design and solve specific safety-relevant challenges and surface top safety priorities would help close this translation gap.
PAISI will aim to run two workshops per year, co-located with major robotics venues (such as CoRL, RSS, and ICRA). These fall into two complementary formats: coordination workshops, which convene the community to surface and consolidate research opinion on the top priorities and open questions within physical AI safety, typically producing a collectively authored research agenda or consensus statement; and challenge workshops, which pose concrete technical problems and build the benchmarks and evaluation infrastructure needed to drive progress on them.
Each challenge workshop will be organized around a small number of well-specified challenge problems with clear evaluation metrics, designed to attract participation from researchers who may not self-identify as "safety researchers" but who have relevant technical expertise. According to our current thinking, a challenge workshop will consist of three components:
The workshop series and the fellowship are designed to be mutually reinforcing. Fellowship research streams will often be informed by priorities surfaced at coordination workshops; challenge workshops will often be designed by fellowship mentors. Fellows who produce strong work during their cohort are natural candidates for workshop presentations, and workshop participants are a natural recruiting pool for future fellowship cohorts.
There is currently no structured educational resource for physical AI safety. Researchers entering the field must piece together background from disparate sources: the classical robotics safety literature (largely focused on industrial manipulators and collision avoidance), the LLM safety curriculum (which covers interpretability, alignment, and robustness but not embodiment), and the robot foundation model literature (which is moving extremely fast and is almost entirely capabilities-focused). This fragmentation raises the barrier to entry in physical AI safety.
The Center for AI Safety's Introduction to ML Safety course demonstrated that a well-designed open course can serve as a field-building tool in its own right: it provides a canonical reading list, defines a shared vocabulary, and gives newcomers a structured onramp that they can complete independently. No equivalent exists for the embodied domain.
PAISI will develop and maintain a free, self-paced online course covering the foundations of physical AI safety. The course will assume familiarity with machine learning and some exposure to robotics or control, and is targeted at graduate students, early-career researchers, and industry practitioners who want to understand the safety landscape for RFMs. An initial syllabus could look like:
Each course module will include video lectures, a curated reading list, problem sets, and (where possible) hands-on coding exercises using open-source simulation environments. The course will be updated annually to reflect the rapid pace of development in RFMs.
The course is the latest of our three programs to launch, planned for 2027. This is deliberate: we want the course content to be informed by what we learn from the first cohorts of fellows and the first rounds of workshop challenges. The fellowship and workshops serve as a proving ground for identifying which topics, techniques, and framings are most valuable, and the course distills those findings into a durable educational resource.
PAISI's three planned programs address three distinct bottlenecks in physical AI safety—talent (fellowship), coordination and research prioritization (workshops), and accessibility (course)—but they share a common theory of change: the most effective way to make physical AI safe is to grow the community of people working on the problem.
We do not believe that physical AI safety will be solved by a single breakthrough or a single organization. It will require sustained effort from many researchers across academia, industry, and independent organizations—developing new evaluation methods, building interpretability tools, red-teaming deployed systems, and designing safety-aware training procedures and guardrails. Our goal is to lower the activation energy for all of this work: to make it easier to enter the field, easier to find collaborators, easier to learn the background material, and easier to identify the most important open problems.
This is a *catalytic *model. We will measure our success not by the papers we publish, but by the number of researchers working on physical AI safety who were not working on it before, and by the quality of the shared infrastructure—benchmarks, evaluation protocols, educational resources, and community norms—that makes their work possible.
There is real urgency here. The bottlenecks to general-purpose robotics look breakable on a timeline of years, not decades, and the community that can make these systems safe must exist before they are widely deployed. The safety field has spent a decade building the tools to align systems that think. The next decade will deliver systems that think and act.
Spatial / world models; robotics is one of several use cases
The full table with all companies detailed can be found in our paper Valuation of an in-progress round (~$1B raise, not yet closed); $0.126B is capital raised to date.
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One caveat we should mention: the mis-aligned goal-seeking behavior that Gemini seemed to exhibit in this story arose from a long interactive conversation with a human. We aren't aware of any evidence that current LLMs pursue this kind of goal "in a vacuum.'" However, home robots will also sustain long interactions with humans, which will presumably require long-term memory and the associated accumulation of unique context that can cause undesirable and difficult-to-predict behaviors in LLMs.
As discussed below, by tractability we specifically mean that useful directions can be easily identified and are amenable to progress, not that completely 'solving' the problem will be easy.
Coefficient Giving. Strategic cause selection, 2025. In particular, we are arguing that RFMs with robust manipulation capabilities could be developed before non-physical AI can autonomously advance robotics research. This matters for our case because it means that we should devote resources to physical AI safety in its own right, rather than assuming that safe and aligned non-physical AI will solve this problem for us.
Ali Amin et al.[ : a VLA that learns from experience](https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14759), 2025.
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We expect that benchmarks do not perfectly measure real-world failure rates, and that real-world failures will be generally more common than benchmark failures due to distribution shift, benchmark overfitting, etc.
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With thanks to Slattery et al. and Perlo et al. whose work was helpful in developing our risk taxonomy.
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For example, humanoid robot startup Figure lists manufacturing and warehousing among its initial target markets; there are about 14 million US workers currently employed in nonsupervisory (~unskilled) positions in these industries.
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While our primary focus (and personal expertise) is on technical safety research, it is our understanding that research on physical AI governance is also very neglected: Jared Perlo et al. Embodied AI: Emerging risks and opportunities for policy action, 2025.
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