Meta: Acquisition of Assured Robot Intelligence as a ticket to the race for humanoid robots

Meta has closed the acquisition of startup Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI), a small team of about 20 people in San Diego and New York that develops advanced AI models for robots. According to Meta, ARI "stands at the edge of robotic intelligence" and aims to make robots able to understand, predict and adapt to human behaviour in complex environments - exactly what we expect from future humanoids.

The ARI team, led by co-founders Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang, is heading under Meta Superintelligence Labs and will work side-by-side with Meta Robotics Studio, which was founded in 2025 and addresses hardware and core technology for humanoids. Wang previously worked as a researcher at Nvidia, and Pinto co-founded Fauna Robotics - which was bought by Amazon this March to bolster its own humanoid projects. Neither the financial terms nor ARI's valuation have been disclosed, but the nature of the deal is clear: it's an acquisition of a top team, not a large capital transaction.

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