The 4-foot-tall humanoid robot that’s in front of me seems, quite honestly, a bit drunk. It leaps from one leg to the other, waving its arms. After 30 seconds or so it abruptly stops, then strides toward me with an arm outstretched.
The little robot is at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, on the banks of the Huangpu river in Shanghai. The convention center is teeming with humanoids—dancing ones, box-toting ones, robot dog-walking ones doing circuits around trade show booths. A few lie slumped in a corner as their batteries recharge.
DEC 12, 2025. Beijing, China. A Unitree humanoid robot modified for experimental purposes at the BAAI. Liu for WIRED. Y
It’s a balmy day in July, and I’ve come to Shanghai to learn how China’s AI world differs from the Western one I usually cover. I’d immediately noticed the sleek electric cars from BYD, Xiaomi, and Huawei that fill the streets of the city’s fashionable old French Concession. At Manner, a high-end coffee chain, I sampled an avant-garde beverage called a “sparkling citrus iced Americano.” Now that I’m at the convention, I can’t help but picture these dancing robots strolling Shanghai’s streets and perhaps carrying their owner’s shopping bags.
A group crowds around a small boxing ring, where two humanoids throw punches at each other. One falls down, then gets back on its haunches and straightens up. A young woman offers to let me punch a humanoid. I feel certain that this would make me feel bad, so I decline.
The activity in this convention center is a bit of a mirage, of course. Amid the throngs, you can spot people holding game controllers. They’re giving the robots high-level instructions. The humanoids can control their balance and execute short routines, but it’s humans who tell them which way to walk, whom to shake hands with, or when to backflip. Another limitation: Many humanoids don’t have fingers. Their arms usually end in stumps, meaning that while they can hold and lift boxes (or wear boxing gloves, they can’t grasp anything.
Even so, experts predict that robots will have profound effects on the workforce and the economy. Amazon is testing humanoids from an American startup called Agility and, according to leaked memos, expects to replace a significant number of workers with robots in the next few years. Bank of America analysts predict that by 2035, robot makers will ship 10 million humanoids a year. Morgan Stanley forecasts that by 2050 a billion will be in use, with almost a third of them—302.3 million—in China, compared with 77.7 million in the US.
Perhaps no humanoid maker has a bigger lead than a Hangzhou-based company called Unitree. While Elon Musk’s Optimus staggers through its demos, Unitree’s robots are doing sprints, kung-fu kicks, and acrobatic backflips. (The conference’s dancing door greeter was a Unitree.) Unitree’s legged robots are also incredibly cheap, costing tens of thousands of dollars or less, a tenth of what a typical humanoid in the US costs. Unitree is China’s most prominent robotics startup, a national champion for its tech industry, and is reportedly targeting a $7 billion IPO listing in Shanghai. And if Unitree fails? A staggering 200-plus other Chinese companies are also developing humanoids, which recently prompted the Chinese government to warn of overcapacity and unnecessary replication. The US has about 16 prominent firms building humanoids.
With stats like that, one can’t help but suspect that the first country to have a million humanoids will be China.