Technology

Beijing Could Throw Wrench In Sam Altman’s Humanoid Robot Dreams

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

The maker of ChatGPT wants to build humanoid robots using parts still dominated by China.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed the company plans to build humanoid robots alongside the artificial intelligence models intended to power them, he said on a Sept. 1 episode of the Sources Podcast and Alex Heath. The company’s push to focus on robotics will leave it dependent on China, whose supply chains control the rare-earth mining and magnet processing needed to build these robots, Forbes reported.

“We will definitely do a humanoid [robot],” Altman said during the Sept. 1 podcast.

Meanwhile, China processes the majority of the minerals and parts needed to build these robots for the U.S. Market.

Actuators — or robot motors — make up roughly 40% to 60% of a humanoid robot’s build cost, according to an April 2026 McKinsey & Company humanoid supply-chain report. These motors run on rare-earth magnets refined predominantly in China, the report found.

Roughly 90 percent of the world’s magnet processing runs through China, as does about 69 percent of rare-earth mining that feeds it, according to McKinsey & Company.

Without Chinese suppliers, a typical humanoid robot would cost roughly $131,000 to build, robotics firm OpenMind stated in its 2026 Physical AI Readiness Index. That figure is nearly triple the $46,000 the same robot would cost under standard supply chains, which already run through China.

Altman mentioned that these robots would ideally specialize in different tasks such as working in data centers, he said during the podcast. He recognized the need to focus on artificial intelligence to advance infrastructure that is “building this world for people.”

“I would love to have a personal robot that could do the tasks that I don’t wanna do,” Altman said. “That’d be great.”

OpenAI previously eliminated its robotics team in 2021 after it was unable to acquire enough real-world robot data to train its models, VentureBeat reported.

OpenAI and OpenMind each did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

“We found that to solve embodied AI at scale in the real world, you have to vertically integrate robot AI. We can’t outsource AI for the same reason we can’t outsource our hardware,” Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock said in February 2025 after the company parted ways with OpenAI, TechCrunch reported.

Figure AI produces general-purpose humanoid robots intended for use in factories with the prospect of them being used in homes, according to the company’s ‘Master Plan’ page.

“Robots that can think, learn, reason, and interact with their environments will eventually be capable of performing tasks better than humans,” Figure AI wrote, according to its ‘Master Plan.’ “Over time, humans could leave the loop [of manual labor jobs] altogether as robots become capable of building other robots.”

The company explained that this will decrease the cost of labor and give people opportunities to live how they want, with a “higher standard of living,” according to its website.