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Sam Altman settled a two-year question this week: OpenAI will "definitely" build its own humanoid. His reasoning is anatomical rather than strategic — keyboards, doorways, machinery and kitchens were all built around human bodies. Days later, GPT-6 Astra — the new OpenAI model everyone is talking about — drove a pair of arms at 95% success, more than double the previous frontier model's rate. General capability is arriving at robotics as a side effect.
NVIDIA agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, putting the open model hub and the accelerators under one roof. Figure committed $3.5 billion to compute, with plans to pass $6 billion. XPENG opened its IRON production line, which shares 85% of its supply chain with the company's cars.
Agility is going public through a $2.5 billion SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI. We read the joint Form S-4, filed 4 September: $1.78 million in net sales for 2025, a $138.1 million loss, 64% of that revenue from related parties, and auditors recording substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue. It is the first audited look at a US humanoid business.
IN THIS EDITION
OpenAI will build a humanoid — Altman says "definitely," and explains why anatomy decides it
GPT-6 Astra hits 95% on block placement — a general model, more than doubling the previous frontier score
Figure commits $3.5 billion to compute — 100,000 GPUs, and Nscale takes equity in return
Agility's audited numbers are in — $1.8M in sales, a $138M loss, and a backlog owed to an insider
XPENG opens its IRON production line — robots that walk off the end of it under their own power
TOGETHER WITH LTX
Markov Robotics uses LTX-2.5 as the manipulation policy itself: head cam in, generated video of the task out, robot executes what the video says. LTX's Yoav HaCohen says the fine-tune that got the model predicting action tokens alongside video took under an hour.
LTX-2.5 ships open weights plus a raw 22B pretrained checkpoint for domain fine-tuning. Runs on your own hardware. Free under $10M ARR.
TOP STORIES
Altman has confirmed OpenAI will build its own humanoid robots, ending speculation that the hardware roadmap stopped at industrial and data centre automation. His argument is that matching human anatomy is unavoidable, because the physical world — computer keyboards, doorways, heavy machinery, kitchens — was constructed for human bodies. The near-term focus stays on industrial infrastructure and the underlying cognitive model; ubiquitous domestic humanoids remain the long-term ideal rather than the next product. The confirmation follows OpenAI's formal robotics division, a run of mechanical engineering hires, and its split from Figure.
Why it matters: OpenAI has spent two years supplying intelligence to other people's bodies and then walking away from those partnerships. Building its own hardware turns it from supplier into competitor for every humanoid company currently training on its models.
Astra was tested on dual I2RT YAM arms through the open-source Inspect Robots framework, mapping multi-view camera input straight to 6-DoF end-effector targets.
In hardware trials run by RoboCurve, GPT-6 Astra completed a block-placement task in 19 of 20 runs, against 40% for Claude Fable 5.1, while cutting token generation by 6.2x and run cost to $0.94. On a millimetre-tolerance puzzle insertion task it hit the same wall as Fable, finishing 2 of 20. The tests used the open-source Inspect Robots framework on dual I2RT YAM arms, mapping multi-view camera input directly to 6-DoF end-effector targets.
Why it matters: This is OpenAI's flagship general model doing it, not a robotics system — a thin harness mapped camera frames to 6-DoF targets, with no robot foundation model in the loop. Robotics teams have spent years hand-assembling perception, planning and control to reach that kind of reliability on a task like this.
Figure has signed a multi-year partnership with Nscale to deploy up to 100,000 GPUs on NVIDIA's next-generation Vera Rubin platform, an initial commitment of $3.5 billion that the two companies expect to scale beyond $6 billion. Deployments begin in the second half of 2027 at Nscale's facility in Barstow, Texas, and the capacity is earmarked for Helix, Figure's foundation model, alongside the Index crowdsourcing effort it pulled out of stealth last week. Nscale is taking a strategic equity stake in Figure as part of the deal, and the two are exploring putting Figure's humanoids into Nscale's own data centre supply chain.
Why it matters: The commitment is larger than most humanoid companies have raised in total, and it is aimed at a model that has not yet shipped a commercial product. The structure is worth reading closely too: the compute supplier is taking equity in the buyer, and may end up buying the buyer's robots.
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Agility's Digit tidying a mock apartment in the company's "Digit Redecorates" video. The audited filings landed in a rather different register. Image: Agility Robotics
Agility recorded $1.78 million in total net sales for 2025 against a net loss of $138.1 million, with 64% of that revenue coming from related parties. The headline $300 million backlog turns out to be a single contract — 1,000 Digit v5 units on a three-year robots-as-a-service term, placed by a customer the filing identifies as a related party and sweetened with 453,000 warrants that vest as robots deploy. Auditors describe a development stage company whose deployments are "still largely considered to be research and development," and management concludes that substantial doubt exists about its ability to continue as a going concern. Digit v4 is deployed or committed across nine customer facilities, with more than 65,000 hours of real-world operation.
Why it matters: This is the first audited look anyone has had inside a US humanoid company, and the distance between $300 million of backlog and $1.8 million of sales is exactly what every private valuation in this sector is implicitly betting will close. Worth noting too: the filing's competition section names eight rivals and not one Chinese manufacturer, five weeks after an FCC action Agility publicly championed barred new foreign-produced humanoids from the US market.
XPENG CEO He Xiaopeng with a production-intent IRON, complete with company ID badge, inside the manufacturing facility. Image: XPENG
XPENG has opened its mass-production line for IRON, claiming a global first in that production units assemble and then walk off the line under their own power, with no human assistance or teleoperation. The line runs automotive-grade quality control, exceeds 80% automation across key assembly steps, and shares 85% of its supply chain with XPENG's EV manufacturing. Three in-house Turing AI chips deliver 2,250 TOPS, supporting bilingual dialogue, dynamic obstacle avoidance and autonomous charging-dock navigation. The line is open rather than running at volume: what comes off it first goes to XPENG showrooms and campuses, with enterprise deliveries slated for 2027.
Why it matters: XPENG has the manufacturing experience and the supply chain to scale this quickly. 85% of IRON's parts overlap with the company's EVs, and the line carries the same automotive-grade quality control and 80%-plus automation that XPENG runs on its cars.
THE RUNDOWN
Tesla — Chinese supply-chain reports point to first multi-thousand-unit Optimus component orders, around 5,000 units, as the Fremont line commissions. More →
NVIDIA — buys Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, promising the hub stays open and hardware-agnostic, and folding it in alongside Isaac GR00T and Cosmos in LeRobot. More →
Wandercraft — signs 12 blue-chip customers for Calvin-40 while reportedly raising €100M at a €750M valuation. More →
AGIBOT and Minth — open Europe's first humanoid mass production line in Šabac, Serbia, on €20M initial investment with a €200M industrial park planned. More →
Unitree — UnifoLM-X2 runs fully autonomous G1 sparring with no teleoperation, though telemetry suggests the world-model inference runs offboard. More →
X Square Robot — TwinDEX exoskeletons hit 5.3x the data throughput of on-robot teleoperation, completing a 24-step chemistry experiment with zero on-robot training data. More →
Reuters — a review of 100+ Chinese army tenders and patents finds active research into humanoids for war. More →
Dynamic Creatures — Boston Dynamics' former chief strategy officer emerges from stealth to build expressive guest-facing robots for theme parks. More →
GMO — Tokyo now has a humanoid ambulance: a van with spare parts, diagnostic gear and an engineer who performs field surgery on broken bipeds. More →
This edition of Humanoids Daily was presented by RoboStrategy.
Figure committed $3.5 billion to compute this week. Agility disclosed $1.78 million in annual sales. Both are building humanoids for industrial work.
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