Sanctuary AI Phoenix

Sanctuary AI is a Vancouver-based robotics company founded in 2018 with a specific goal: build a general-purpose robot that learns tasks the way humans do. Their approach centres on Carbon, a proprietary AI brain that combines a world model with a task model. Rather than programming a robot for each job, Carbon learns new tasks through human teleoperation — an operator demonstrates a task remotely, and the system generalises that into autonomous behaviour. The robot, named Phoenix, is built around that learning architecture from the ground up.

Phoenix Gen 7 stands around 170 cm tall and weighs approximately 70 kg. Its most distinctive feature is its hands: each has 20 degrees of freedom, giving it manipulation capability comparable to a human hand. That dexterity, paired with Carbon's learning system, lets Phoenix handle a wide range of physical tasks — the company has demonstrated over 110 distinct skills across retail, manufacturing, and healthcare settings. Early commercial deployments include pilots with Canadian Tire subsidiary businesses (Mark's and Sport Chek) and PriceSmart Foods, where Phoenix performed shelf-stocking, product handling, and backroom logistics tasks.

What separates Sanctuary's approach from peers like Tesla Optimus or Figure AI is the emphasis on the AI side rather than sheer hardware capability. Carbon is described as a large action model — analogous to a large language model, but producing physical actions rather than text. The company's thesis is that intelligence, not hardware, is the limiting factor in general-purpose robotics. Funding reached $58 million at the 2022 Series A, with additional investment rounds through 2024. As of mid-2026, Phoenix remains in an enterprise pilot phase, with Sanctuary expanding its deployment programme and refining the Carbon system toward broader commercial availability.