NVIDIA's GR00T reaches 1.7 in early access as the open-building-block position in robotics consolidates
GR00T, announced as an open foundation model for humanoids in March 2025, is at 1.7 in early access following the N1.6 release at CES 2026 with Cosmos Reason integration. Three release cycles in fifteen months makes it the closest thing robotics has to a standard substrate.
The strategic position is familiar from every previous NVIDIA platform play: supply the layer everyone builds on, remain neutral about who wins above it, and sell the hardware underneath regardless. In robotics that layer is the foundation model, and GR00T has now iterated through enough cycles to have accumulated the thing that actually creates lock-in — a body of work built against it.
Cosmos Reason integration is the substantive addition rather than a version bump. Robotics failures are overwhelmingly failures of situational reasoning rather than of actuation, and coupling a reasoning component to the control model addresses the part of the stack that pilots keep dying on.
The open positioning is doing real competitive work against the integrated builders. A hardware company that cannot afford its own foundation-model research can adopt GR00T and compete on the body; a Figure or a Tesla cannot easily match that by opening their own. For H2 2026, watch whether the long tail of hardware makers standardises here.
Humanoid Hub — Robot Foundation Models — 2026 landscape → · Raedan Institute — Robotics and AI in 2026: From Factory Floors to Foundation Models →