Factory AI

Factory AI is a company that builds an agent you can hand your entire coding job to. It started in San Francisco in 2023, and the agent it makes is called Droid.

It's easy to mistake Droid for a model name, but it isn't. Droid is a product built around a "way of working" — the actual thinking is done by models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. What Factory built is the layer that decides which model to use for which task, and manages the process of editing code, testing it, and shipping it.

It also swaps models depending on the job: cheaper open models for low-stakes work, pricier models for harder tasks. So even though it's always "Droid," the model running behind the scenes changes from moment to moment.

As of August 2026, Droid gets hooked up to the latest models as they come out, like Grok 4.6. Factory is also expanding toward "agents that run anywhere" — for example, building a development environment on NVIDIA's personal AI computer (DGX Spark) where code never leaves the machine.

"Droid fixed the code" — this doesn't mean a model called Droid did the fixing. It means Factory's agent called on someone else's model to do the work.