Tech companies are collectively spending billions to turn the age old sci-fi trope of humanoid, general-purpose robots into reality. So far, that momentous effort has mostly produced staged performances,

Humanoid robots spent 2025 straddling a strange line between breakthrough and blooper reel. They poured lattes, posed in fashion campaigns and even stepped into kickboxing rings, only to trip, moonwalk into the floor and literally fall on their faces in front of global audiences.

But if you shrink that robot down, give it the ambulatory capabilities of a human and bathe the whole thing in AI, Hyundai reckons it can replace the most unreliable element of the modern assembly line: the human laborer. Enter Atlas, one of those humanoid ‘bots I mentioned up top there. As it turns out, Atlas can do more than dodge a hockey stick.

In the humanoid robot competition, the US and China stand out as the two leading forces. Jonathan Hurst, co-founder of US-based humanoid robotics startup Agility Robotics, recently shared his views on the rapid advancements of Chinese humanoid robots..

There is no question that 2026 is already set up to be something of a continuance of 2025, at least in the sense of moving deeper into the world of AI, automation, and robotics. As companies deploy AI at scale and industrial robots continue to replace human labor slowly,