Robots, autonomous vehicles, and AI acting in the physical world.
Current topic Robotics & Physical AI · 26 Switch topic
Latest stories
-
Google releases Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics, built for stronger physical reasoning
Google released Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics, a model that helps robots understand physical environments and practice in simulation to raise real-world success. According to AI Times, it does not drive robots directly. It is a high-level reasoning engine that automatically builds physics simulations such as MuJoCo and generates large volumes of training data to improve robot-control models (VLAs). That data raised a general VLA model's task success rate from 56% to 75%, and Argon scored 87% on the ERQA physical-reasoning benchmark without external tools.
-
Amazon has over 1 million robot workers. What’s next for human employees?
Amazon runs more than 1 million robots in its warehouses, more than any other organization, according to Ars Technica, and it also employs more than 1.5 million full- and part-time humans. Executives say the robots take on the tasks with the greatest risk of fatigue and injury. Labor groups and independent researchers say AI-driven automation is not all upside for workers. George Mason University business professor Greenwood says collaborative robots differ from earlier automation because they work physically close to people and can dictate the pace of work.
-
AMD acquires World Labs AI startup, upping the ante against Nvidia
AMD will acquire world models startup World Labs for $8.2 billion, pending regulatory approval, with closing expected by year end. Fei-Fei Li and colleagues founded World Labs in 2024 with $230 million, some of it from AMD. Li becomes AMD's executive vice president and chief scientist. AMD says the deal will help it understand how workloads are shifting toward robotics and physical AI.
-
Former Ukrainian Defense Minister Fedorov pitches a private-sector robot army
Former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said at the IT Arena 2026 conference that drones now account for more than 95% of all battlefield engagements. He launched a new private-sector project called 'Robot Army,' aimed at achieving full battlefield robotization. Ukraine already has more than 700 drone manufacturers, and Fedorov said robots should fight, not people.
-
Anthropic Quietly Opens a Wet Lab to Move Beyond Simulation Into Real Experiments
Anthropic confirmed to Reuters on September 18 that it has quietly opened a wet lab in the San Francisco Bay Area. Where the company previously stuck to 'dry lab' data analysis, Claude now directly controls robotic lab equipment with minimal human oversight to run real experiments aimed at finding treatments for rare diseases. Life sciences lead Eric Kauderer-Abrams said the company will keep running both its own facility and outside pharma partnerships, since 'the ultimate test of biology happens in the physical lab.'
-
Anthropic opens AI-powered biology research lab
Anthropic has opened a wet lab in the San Francisco Bay Area where Claude-powered robots run biology experiments in its place, Reuters reported. The company is developing a "Model Hardware Standard" for controlling lab equipment with medical research institute HHMI, and said its latest model, Claude Mythos 5.1, achieved a 50% success rate designing high-affinity binding molecules, well above the 10-15% typical of ordinary protein-design projects. A spokesperson said the company isn't specialized in drug discovery and is exploring licensing its findings to pharmaceutical companies instead.
-
Agility's new humanoid robot will stop, squat to avoid harming human coworkers
Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5, its first humanoid robot engineered to work safely alongside people. Using multiple sensors, it detects nearby humans and either stops at a distance or drops into a seated squat to avoid collision if someone gets close. Earlier Digit generations have logged more than 65,000 hours at companies including GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon, and Toyota. Digit 5 goes to early customers in the first half of 2027 and becomes generally available by year-end.
-
GPT-6 Astra pilots a surveillance drone and runs a business on its own
AI evaluation firm Andon Labs tested OpenAI's new GPT-6 Astra model on two benchmarks, Vending-Bench and Drone-Bench. Running a simulated vending machine business in Vending-Bench, Astra averaged $15,515 across six runs, nearly three times Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.1's $5,422 average, and even Astra's worst run beat Fable's best. In Drone-Bench, where the model piloted a drone under the instruction "find this person and follow them," Astra beat the human baseline on all five tasks for the first time, though its odds of clearing all five steps in a row were just 2.8%.
-
I spent $4,000 on a robot dog from China
An Ars Technica reporter bought a Unitree Go2 Pro quadruped robot from China for $4,017 and used it for months. It's still rough around the edges, once collapsing on its back just steps from home after its battery hit 5% and its internal temperature reached 84°C, but the appeal is the price: comparable robots from Boston Dynamics start around $75,000, while Unitree's cheapest Go2 Air model, at $1,600, undercuts Spot by more than 97%. Unitree has carried the same low-cost strategy into humanoid robots, where 2025 revenue jumped eightfold year over year, and shares surged more than fivefold on their first day on the Shanghai exchange in August, valuing the company at $34 billion.
-
Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led deal amid rush for robot training data
Mecka AI, a startup that pays people to record everyday motions like making coffee or fixing a car for humanoid robot training, is nearing a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital at a roughly $500 million valuation, TechCrunch reports. That's just three months after it closed a $60 million Series A led by Framework Ventures. The company, founded in 2024 by four people with no robotics background, is aiming for $100 million in annual run rate (ARR) by the end of 2026.
September 20261
August 202611
- Inside Meta's push to put robots to work in data centers ↗
- Anthropic wants to do for physical hardware what its Model Context Protocol did for software ↗
- Inside Meta’s Push to Put Robots to Work in Data Centers ↗
- Anthropic Unveils 'MHS,' a Physical-AI Version of MCP for Connecting AI Agents to Hardware ↗
- This Is How Anthropic Thinks AI Agents Should Navigate the Physical World ↗
- I spent a day at a robot "carnival" in Shanghai. Here's what I saw. ↗
- Former SpaceX engineers are building a robotic factory for making steel parts ↗
- What happens when a kid's robot best friend dies? ↗
- The Next Big Influencer Is This 4-Foot-Tall Robot From China ↗
- Trump’s AI protectionism has come for robotics ↗
- US company’s AI lets Ukraine’s cheap kamikaze drones track targets on their own ↗
July 20264
- Gemini Robotics ER 2: powering robotics with video understanding, task orchestration, and multi-robot collaboration ↗
- At Waymo, an AI project isn't ready until its evals are — not when the model performs well ↗
- Enigma raises $71M to make controlling a robot as easy as adjusting the volume ↗
- Hyundai claims humanoid robot plan is not part of talks with striking workers ↗
Following Robotics & Physical AI? Get the daily briefing by email.
The day's briefing goes out every morning at 8AM KST, which is the evening before in the US. A weekly synthesis on Sundays and a monthly report at the start of each month come with it.
Free · no ads · one-click unsubscribe