Founders
The five hardest questions investors ask deep-tech founders
Why now? Why you? Why won't Big Tech build this? What's the capital efficiency curve? What's the default exit path? The surface question is rarely the real question.
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Physical AI Safety
The gap between robot intelligence and robot safety infrastructure
Independent weekly analysis by Mati Melchior.
What is Physical AI Safety?
Physical AI Safety is the discipline of designing and assuring the safety of physical AI systems — robots, autonomous vehicles, and other machine-learning-driven machines that act in the physical world — at assurance levels comparable to established functional safety. It bridges three traditions, AI Safety, Functional Safety, and Robot Safety, none of which, alone, addresses the failure modes that arise when machine-learning components drive physical actuators.
Physical AI Safety by the numbers
The gap is measurable in public data. Every figure below is sourced.
| Figure | What it measures | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 4M+ | industrial robots in operation worldwide | International Federation of Robotics (2024) |
| 123 | Israeli Physical AI companies identified in the national AI strategy report | Israel Innovation Authority, via Physical AI Safety analysis (2026) |
| <25% | of those companies show any visible functional-safety certification effort | Physical AI Safety analysis of Israel Innovation Authority data (2026) |
| 77 | robot-related accidents in US OSHA Severe Injury Reports (2015–2022) | Sanders, Şener & Chen, Applied Ergonomics (2024) |
| 93 | injuries recorded across those 77 incidents | Sanders, Şener & Chen, Applied Ergonomics (2024) |
| >60% | of robot incidents trace to unexpected activation — the robot moved when the worker believed it was stopped | Guo et al., Safety Science (2025) |
| 20 Jan 2027 | EU Machinery Regulation 2023/1230 applies in full — no transition period | EUR-Lex, Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 (2027) |
Latest analysis
Engineering
Every robot demo shows what happens when the AI works. Nobody demos what happens when it doesn't.
The test that matters isn't performance. It's failure. What does your robot do when the model crashes mid-motion? If you can't answer that in one sentence — that's the problem.
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Regulation
Is the industry ready for 20 January? Nobody has measured it.
Under five months from a regulation that binds an industry which is 98% SMEs, not one trade association, notified body or consultancy has published a readiness figure. What exists instead is the industry's own request for a delay — and that is more revealing than a survey.
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The Physical AI Safety Gap
A 60-page report on why robot intelligence outpaced robot safety infrastructure.
Physical AI Safety Dispatch
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