Robots, autonomous vehicles, and AI acting in the physical world.
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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.
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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.
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Travis Kalanick's Atoms might be getting into the robotaxi business
Atoms, the robotics startup founded by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, is exploring a move into the robotaxi business. The company raised $1.7 billion this summer in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, and Uber separately invested $100 million in it. Kalanick calls the expansion "unfinished business" from his Uber days.
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Inside Meta's push to put robots to work in data centers
Meta is testing robots from vendors including Watney Robotics, Kinova, and ABB to handle tasks like plugging in cables and resetting servers inside its data centers, according to current and former employees. In one experiment, a Kinova Gen3 robotic arm is being evaluated for power-cycling servers, while another robot is being tested to swap networking cables. One Meta data center worker, saying "we thought those of us performing the physical tasks were safe for a while, but not anymore," estimated the robots could replace up to 80% of certain workers' tasks if the effort succeeds.
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Anthropic wants to do for physical hardware what its Model Context Protocol did for software
Anthropic unveiled the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), which lets AI agents control physical devices like microscopes and robotic arms through a unified interface. It extends Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), which gave AI standardized access to software tools and data, into the physical world. A single reusable MHS driver replaces the custom integration work each device used to require, with a goal of cutting connection time from weeks or months to hours or minutes.
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Inside Meta’s Push to Put Robots to Work in Data Centers
Meta is testing robots from several vendors inside its data centers that can swap networking cables and power-cycle servers. One data center worker estimated that if the robots succeed, they could replace up to 80% of some people's workloads. Meta is piloting robots from Watney Robotics, Kinova, and ABB in Iowa, Virginia, and Ohio, though for now they're slower than humans and still work under supervision.
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Anthropic Unveils 'MHS,' a Physical-AI Version of MCP for Connecting AI Agents to Hardware
Anthropic unveiled the Model Hardware Standard (MHS) on August 27, a common specification that lets AI agents directly understand and control physical lab equipment, from microscopes to liquid handlers to robotic arms, instead of needing custom integration code for each device. Building that integration used to take weeks or months per device; Anthropic says MHS aims to cut it to hours or minutes. The company describes MHS as a physical-world counterpart to MCP, its software connection standard, with AWS, Danaher, Doosan Robotics, Universal Robots, and Hugging Face signed on as early partners.
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This Is How Anthropic Thinks AI Agents Should Navigate the Physical World
Anthropic unveiled the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), a new framework that lets AI agents directly control physical lab equipment like microscopes, liquid-handling machines, quantum computing hardware, and robot arms. Instead of writing custom integration code for each device from a different manufacturer, MHS gives them one common interface, which Anthropic says can cut experiment setup time from weeks or months down to hours or minutes. A demo video shows Claude figuring out, without being specifically trained, how to direct a robot arm to pick up an aluminum can.
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I spent a day at a robot "carnival" in Shanghai. Here's what I saw.
A MIT Technology Review reporter visited a robot "carnival" at an R&D center outside Shanghai, where more than 100 companies showed off their machines. Demonstrations included DexForce's coffee-making humanoid, a robotic arm folding laundry, quadruped robots training to climb stairs, and humanoids performing drunken-boxing routines and backflips. About 90% of the roughly 13,000 two-armed, two-legged humanoid robots shipped worldwide in 2025 were made in China.
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Former SpaceX engineers are building a robotic factory for making steel parts
Three former SpaceX engineers launched 1872, which opened its Factory One robotic facility in Cincinnati, Ohio on July 22. Using AI software and robots, the startup builds steel skids — movable foundation frames — to supply AI data center and small modular reactor construction projects. With the American Welding Society projecting a need for 320,500 new welders by 2029, 1872 aims to close that labor gap through automation.
August 20264
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 ↗