Physical AI

Physical AI is the category of AI systems designed to perceive, reason about, and act in the physical world rather than purely digital environments. The defining property is embodied interaction: a physical AI system has sensors that read the real world, actuators or vehicles that change it, and a decision layer that connects them. Robotaxis, humanoid robots, autonomous delivery vehicles, and embodied research platforms all fall under physical AI. Enterprise language models, coding agents, and chat assistants do not.

The distinction matters because investment, regulatory framing, and capability comparisons routinely conflate the two. A company building an enterprise LLM and a company building a humanoid robot are both labeled "AI companies" in casual coverage, but they face different scaling laws, regulatory risks, and customer types. DEPLOY's registry covers the physical AI category specifically.