Runway introduces Praxis-1, an open-weight 'world action model' that turns video pretraining into robot control
Around Sept 30, 2026 Runway introduced Praxis-1, its first world action model for robotics. It builds on the video pretraining behind Runway's general world models and gives one policy for many robot bodies (bimanual rigs, 6-DoF arms, mobile bases) without retraining. Early partners are Noble Machines, Standard Bots and Ultra. Runway says open weights will follow "in the coming months".
Key facts
- Praxis-1: Runway's first open-weight world action model, a generalist policy for 'any embodiment or environment'
- Partners testing it: Noble Machines (bimanual manipulation), Standard Bots (RO1 6-DoF arm), Ultra (mobile base)
- After fine-tuning, policies pretrained on web video vs teleoperated robot video had nearly identical final placement error: 16.1 cm vs 16.0 cm over 93 evaluation pairs
- Simulating robot policies inside Runway's world model predicted real-world results with 0.95 correlation
- Public open-weight release planned 'in the coming months'; license and parameter count not stated
- Known weak spots named by Runway: transparent materials and deformable cloth
What happened
Runway, known for video generation, moved into robotics. It argues that a policy which learned physical plausibility from video has "an enormous head start" over one trained on scarce robot action data alone.
Why it matters
It is another sign that video and world models are becoming the pretraining base for robot foundation models. If the weights ship openly, it adds a cross-embodiment option alongside π0-style and GR00T models.
Unverified: the exact announcement date (Runway's page says only "September 2026"; secondary reports date it Sept 30). The evidence is narrow (placement error and sim-to-real correlation, with no task success rates).
Changelog
- 2026-10-01: created
Sources (3)
- officialRunway Research: Introducing Praxis-1
- videoRunway video: Introducing Praxis-1
- pressSuperpowerdaily: Runway brings video pretraining to robot control with Praxis-1
id: 2026-09-30-runway-praxis-1 · updated 2026-10-01 · open in the interactive timeline