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SoftBank is in talks to take control of 1X at roughly $6 billion — below the $10 billion the company was reported to be seeking last September, and for a machine that has not yet been confirmed inside a single customer's home. In the same week, UBTECH reported that revenue from full-size humanoids grew 1,445% year over year at a 66.8% gross margin. Capital is arriving faster than delivery is.
Meanwhile the most-read robot on our site this week costs $20,000 and arrives as a box of parts. Asimov 1 kits began shipping to builders with roughly 100 hours of assembly ahead of them, while Nori launched a 19-DoF bimanual manipulator for $1,688, running on a Raspberry Pi 5. Neither will fold your laundry. Both are in the hands of real users, which is more than the funded platforms can say.
Underneath both, the ground is shifting toward trust. A researcher published a Bluetooth exploit chain that takes root on a Unitree G1 and can spread to the robot standing next to it, and Hyundai used its investor day to promise that Atlas will not replace workers — one day after settling a strike in which automation was an explicit grievance. The questions being asked of these machines have moved from what they can do to who controls them.
IN THIS EDITION
SoftBank wants control of 1X at $6B — $4B below the ask, and NEO still hasn't shipped
Asimov 1 kits are shipping — $20,000 delivered and 100 hours of your own labour
One Bluetooth exploit roots a Unitree G1 — and spreads to the next robot in the room
UBTECH doubled revenue — on a 66.8% margin in full-size humanoids
Hyundai says Atlas won't replace workers — one day after settling a strike about exactly that
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TOP STORIES
NEO flexes its tendon-driven hands, the one part of the machine its knit cover leaves exposed. Compliance and quiet actuation are the argument for putting this robot in a home — the open question is when one actually reaches a buyer.
SoftBank is in talks to acquire a majority stake in 1X Technologies at a valuation of roughly $6 billion, according to The Information — below the $10 billion 1X was reported to be seeking last September. The two numbers describe different transactions, and control normally trades at a premium to a venture mark rather than a discount, which makes the gap more notable rather than less. Every term that would settle the story is unreported: how large "majority" is, whether the money is primary or secondary, whether OpenAI is selling, and whether Bernt Børnich keeps operational control.
Why it matters: 1X sold out its first year of NEO capacity in five days and has still not publicly confirmed a single customer delivery — SoftBank's money buys precisely the production lines and service infrastructure needed to close that gap, and moves the person accountable for closing it to Tokyo.
Freshly fabricated 3D-printed body panels and structural housing shells for the Asimov 1 kit, rolling off the production line ahead of the first builder shipments.
The first production batch of the open-source Asimov 1 is shipping to builders at a final price of $20,000 delivered, up from the $15,000 bill-of-materials target set at the "Here Be Dragons" launch, with import tariffs and international logistics accounting for most of the difference. By running distribution as a structured group buy, the Menlo Research team negotiated industry-grade actuators — normally upwards of $30,000 at single-unit volumes — down close to factory cost. What arrives is a box: roughly 100 hours of torquing, wiring, flashing and calibration stand between a builder and a walking 1.2-meter biped.
Why it matters: Proprietary platforms routinely strand developers for weeks waiting on one replacement part from overseas; open CAD files and MJF-printed shells turn that into a print job, which is the whole argument for building the robot yourself.
Security researcher Olivier Laflamme disclosed UniBLEed, an exploit chain tracked as CVE-2026-76639 and CVE-2026-76640 that hands an unauthenticated attacker within ordinary Bluetooth range full root on a G1 EDU's Locomotion PC — the real-time controller governing balance, motor trajectories, cameras and microphones. The chain turned on an authorization gap in Unitree's cloud backend, which would decrypt and return any robot's device key to any registered user, regardless of whether that account owned the machine. Because stock G1s broadcast identical unpaired Bluetooth profiles, Laflamme showed the attack is wormable: one compromised humanoid can scan for and take over its neighbours.
Why it matters: Unitree patched the cloud flaw and paid a $5,000 bounty, but the local weaknesses — unauthenticated Bluetooth characteristics, unescaped config scripts, unsandboxed root services — sit in firmware on every unit already in the field, on an 80-pound machine whose collision avoidance can be switched off.
Industrial ramp: UBTECH's Walker S series has moved from early automotive pilots into commercial cluster deployments across EV and electronics assembly lines.
UBTECH reported H1 2026 revenue of RMB 1.27 billion (~$188.8M), double the prior year, with full-size humanoid revenue up 1,445% to RMB 590 million and gross margin in that segment reaching 66.8%. Full-size shipments went from 45 units to 921 in twelve months, nearly matching the whole of fiscal 2025 in six months, while net losses narrowed 23% to RMB 339 million. The concentration is the catch: RMB 569 million of that 590 million — 96.4% — came from bespoke industrial and enterprise contracts.
Why it matters: A 66.8% gross margin is the first hard evidence that a full-size humanoid can be sold profitably at all, but revenue tied to custom builds for a handful of tier-one manufacturers is a capex-cycle business, not a product business, until the same unit ships repeatably.
Muñoz presents Hyundai's robotics roadmap in Seoul on August 26, in front of a slide covering Atlas running parts sequencing across five vehicles and 67 items. Image: Hyundai Motor Company.
At Hyundai's CEO Investor Day, José Muñoz announced a US robotics plant starting production in 2028 with 30,000 units of annual capacity, and confirmed that the first 25,000 units are already committed — roughly 83% of first-year output going to Hyundai's own Metaplant in Georgia. He paused the roadmap to state that "robots are not replacing humans," one day after Hyundai's Korean union reached a tentative deal ending its longest walkout in a decade, in which protection against AI and automation was an explicit demand. Members ratified that agreement on Monday with 61.55% in favour — but on automation it commits the two sides only to discuss employment when new businesses roll out, which is a process, not a protection.
Why it matters: Atlas deploys first in Georgia in 2028, with global rollout from 2030, and whatever the Korean Metal Workers' Union secured governs Korean plants — the labour agreement and the deployment are on different continents, and Hyundai has not said how one would apply to the other.
THE RUNDOWN
South Korea — commits KRW 2.3 trillion ($1.66B) through 2030 to a sovereign humanoid stack, targeting 80% component localisation and 1,080 state-purchased robots. More →
Figure — pulls Index out of stealth: 16 million video uploads, 44,000 weekly contributors, $15M paid out and over $1B committed to data and compute. More →
AGIBOT — tops the World Humanoid Robot Games medal table with 46 medals, fielding mass-production units rather than competition prototypes. More →
Galbot — sustains 100+ consecutive autonomous rallies against human players in a live tennis exhibition, on modified G1 hardware. More →
Lumos Robotics — launches the MOS 2 dual-arm manipulator after 1,000 failure-free hours at Mitsubishi Electric, backed by ~$140M. More →
Nori Robotics — ships a $1,688 wheeled bimanual manipulator, unusually candid that its perception pipeline still returns null on live hardware. More →
Scott Walter — proposes a humanoid decathlon with a "No Bot of Theseus" rule: one robot, ten events, no swapped limbs and no downloaded weights. More →
This edition of Humanoids Daily was presented by RoboStrategy.
The throughline this week is that nobody is buying the demo any more. The money, the exploit disclosures and the union contracts are all being written about what these machines actually do on an ordinary Tuesday — and on that measure, a $20,000 box of parts and a $6 billion company are closer than they look.
Seeing something before I do? Just hit reply — that’s where a lot of these stories start.
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