Google is trying to sell Boston Dynamics, the crazy robotics company it bought in 2013

Google's parent company, Alphabet, is trying to sell Boston Dynamics, the robotics company it bought in late 2013, Bloomberg's Brad Stone and Jack Clark report.

Among the potential buyers are the Japanese automaker Toyota and Amazon, which has a robotics division focused on automation in its warehouses.

Boston Dynamics was one of a series of companies that Google bought in 2013 as part of a robotics division called Replicant. It makes humanoid and animal-like mobile robots that it has shown off in a series of mind-blowing YouTube videos.

The robotics team has been essentially adrift since losing its primary architect, Andy Rubin, a year ago. In December, Replicant was folded into the company's Google X hardware lab rather than being spun out into a separate company as some had expected.

Boston Dynamics was reportedly not part of this fold, though, and is instead exploring sale options.

When Rubin launched Replicant, the division was shooting for its first consumer product launch by 2020, according to an email viewed by Business Insider, but efforts became disjointed after Rubin left, and achieving that ambition seemed less likely. Bloomberg reports that Boston Dynamics was reluctant to work with other Google robotics engineers to come up with near-term products, including a "low-cost quadruped robot."

Tensions reportedly ran particularly high after Boston Dynamics published a video in February showing off one of its latest robots. The video went viral.

"There's excitement from the tech press, but we're also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans' jobs," Courtney Hohne, a spokeswoman for Google, wrote on an internal online forum viewed by Bloomberg. She also asked other Googlers to distance its moonshot lab, X, from the video.

"We don't want to trigger a whole separate media cycle about where BD really is at Google," she wrote.

Here's the video in question:

Google X boss Astro Teller also reportedly told the rest of the robotics team that joined X in December that if robotics couldn't provide a practical solution to a problem Google was trying to solve, they would be resassigned to work on other things.

Neither Google nor Boston Dynamics CEO Marc Raibert was immediately available for comment.

Update: A previous version of this story incorrectly pegged the Boston Dynamics acquisition at $500 million.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.