WASHINGTON—The increasingly sophisticated robots emerging from the lab at Boston Dynamics reflect the company’s focus on “athletic” artificial intelligence, founder and Chief Executive Marc Raibert said.

Most AI applications today focus on two areas, image recognition and planning. Mr. Raibert calls this use of AI “scholarly,“ because it solves problems such as route-planning. Athletic AI, meanwhile, is “focused more on real time interactions with the world,” he told WSJ Pro on the sidelines of The Wall Street Journal’s CEO...