Meta Platforms has purchased Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup building artificial intelligence systems for humanoid robots, as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg accelerates a sweeping bet on AI that he acknowledges is directly contributing to mass layoffs across the company.
Meta Closes Deal for Assured Robot Intelligence to Bolster Humanoid Robot Push
Meta Platforms has acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup working at the frontier of robotic AI, the company confirmed on Friday, as Zuckerberg doubles down on a vision to bring humanoid technology into the mainstream. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition was first reported by Bloomberg.
"We acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a company at the frontier of robotic intelligence designed to enable robots to understand, predict, and adapt to human behaviors in complex and dynamic environments," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
Who Are the Founders of Assured Robot Intelligence
The startup was co-founded by researchers Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang, both of whom will join Meta as part of the acquisition. Wang previously worked as a researcher at Nvidia, while Pinto co-founded Fauna Robotics before departing in 2025. Amazon acquired Fauna in March to strengthen its own humanoid robot programme. Assured Robot Intelligence's employees were concentrated in San Diego and New York.
The team will join Meta Superintelligence Labs and work closely with Meta Robotics Studio, an internal division launched last year to develop foundational technology for humanoid robots.
The spokesperson said the group "will bring a deep expertise in how we can design our models and frontier capabilities for robot control and self-learning to whole-body humanoid control."
What Meta Plans to Do With Humanoid Robot Technology
Meta's robotics ambitions extend well beyond a single acquisition. The company is developing in-house humanoid hardware alongside the underlying artificial intelligence that would power it, including sensors, software and other core systems it intends to make available across the broader industry.
The long-term goal, according to Bloomberg reporting from last year, is for Meta to do for the humanoid robot industry what Google's Android operating system and Qualcomm's chips did for the smartphone market: build the foundational platform on which the rest of the sector runs.
The humanoid robotics space has been gaining momentum rapidly, with major technology companies including Tesla, Google and Amazon all making significant investments in the field.
Meta's AI Spending Rises to Between $125 Billion and $145 Billion for 2026
The Assured Robot Intelligence acquisition comes just two days after Meta raised its projected capital expenditure for 2026 by $10 billion, lifting the range to between $125 billion and $145 billion. The company cited higher component prices and additional AI data centre costs as the primary drivers of the increase.
Meta has in recent years redirected significant resources away from its augmented reality Metaverse initiative and towards artificial intelligence. Last month, the company released a new large language model called Muse Spark, which Meta has positioned as competitive with leading models from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.
Investors have responded to the spending plans with caution. Meta shares fell following the company's earnings release on Wednesday and have declined 9.4% over the past five days, closing the week at $608.75.
Analysts at Mizuho wrote in a note earlier this week that while Zuckerberg's broader vision remains short on specifics, its direction is becoming clearer.
"It remains vague, but we can see his agentic consumer focused vision start to take shape," the analysts wrote. "The improving confidence from management was palpable."
Zuckerberg Acknowledges AI Spending Is Driving Meta Layoffs
In a recording of an internal company meeting held on Thursday, reported by the Wall Street Journal, Mark Zuckerberg told employees that Meta's surging AI investment was directly linked to the company's decision to reduce its workforce.
He said "compute and infrastructure" and "people oriented things" were the main cost drivers at Meta, adding: “that means that we do need to take down the size of the company somewhat.”
Meta is expected to cut approximately 8,000 employees, representing around 10% of its workforce, in the coming weeks to offset its ballooning AI expenditure.
Zuckerberg also addressed the relationship between AI efficiency and team size, telling staff: "If a team used to take 50 or 100 people and now it takes 10, having 50 or 100 people on that team can actually be counterproductive going forward so I think we need to fix that."
He added, however, that workforce reductions do not automatically mean redundancies, suggesting AI could help remaining employees "spin up more new projects" across the business.
Meta's Humanoid Robot Bet Comes at a Defining Moment for the Industry
The acquisition of Assured Robot Intelligence places Meta directly in competition with some of the most heavily funded humanoid robot programmes in the world. Tesla, Amazon and Google are all racing to develop robots capable of performing physical tasks in human environments, a market that analysts believe could be worth trillions of dollars over the coming decades.
