“I thought I could make a bigger robot for boxing competitions,” says Wang, the founder and CEO of Hangzhou-based humanoid-robotics firm Unitree. “Then I thought, Why not do an even bigger one that can actually carry a human inside?”
Wang showed off the GD01 exclusively to TIME as part of his first international media interview, revealing that beyond mixed martial arts, he took a dash of inspiration from James Cameron: “We actually drew some references from a similar robot featured in Avatar.”
—Photograph by Mattia Balsamini for TIMEThis is the next great tech frontier, one that has previously been the purview of Star Wars and Blade Runner: AI that walks, sees, hears and physically interacts with the real world. Morgan Stanley predicts that as many as 13 million humanoids could walk among us by 2035—equivalent to the population of Bolivia. That number is forecast to rise to 1 billion by 2050, when the industry could be worth $5 trillion.
We could be, Wang says, anything from two to 10 years away from a “ChatGPT moment” for humanoids, whereby a robot achieves sufficient “generalization” to be able to execute 80% of requested voice commands in an 80% unfamiliar environment. “Once the technology surpasses this ... inflection point, robots can gradually be rolled out for large-scale commercial use,” he says.
We don’t see any significant competitors outside of China.——Elon Musk, on China’s dominance in the humanoid fieldThe company’s GD01 humanoid photographed on June 18 in Hangzhou.The positive outlook is that wide-scale humanoid adoption will herald an unprecedented era of global abundance, automating mundane and dangerous labor while ushering in post-scarcity societies. There is a less rosy divination, however. Amid a mass labor displacement, robots concentrate even more wealth into fewer human hands. With production severed from wages, people could face an identity crisis as robots begin to dominate manual labor and service industries, while governments contend with strained social safety nets and rising competition between the U.S. and China—leaders in humanoids as they are in AI—over raw material and technology. On June 3, three U.S. lawmakers introduced the bipartisan Guard Act, which seeks to ban Chinese robots deemed to be a national-security threat. Unitree was singled out by John Moolenaar, a bill co-sponsor and chairman of the House Select Committee on China, who accused Wang’s firm of benefiting from “generous state subsidies” and threatening to bankrupt American competitors.
The tension between these visions can be reduced to a choice of myth: Are Wang and his GD01, and indeed their competitors, akin to Luke Skywalker and the faithful, guileless C-3PO—or more like Frankenstein and his monster?
But if that sounds like a future arriving faster than society can absorb it, Wang insists the transition will be gradual. “It will evolve step-by-step,” he says. “If society finds that robots don’t perform well in a certain sector, or if people simply don’t like them there, we can easily pivot and re-direct their application to other fields. So, everything remains well within controllable boundaries.”
The possibilities and promises of a humanoid revolution have occupied him since he was 10 years old and first watched early televised robotics experiments performed at MIT by Marc Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics. He spent his free time building model aircraft, conducting experiments, and, before long, assembling miniature turbojet engines.
After graduation and a stint at Shenzhen-based drone trailblazer DJI, Wang launched Unitree with 2 million RMB ($300,000) in capital from an angel investor. It has since become a cultural phenomenon; an estimated 600 million people watched videos of Unitree’s H2 and G1 humanoid robots swinging nunchucks and executing flips as part of February’s Spring Festival Gala—China’s equivalent to the Super Bowl halftime show. It was the second year that Unitree humanoids provided the headline act, and all eyes are on what Wang has planned next time. “I have no idea,” he confesses with a laugh.
But high expectations are both a blessing and a curse. While Unitree’s first-quarter revenue surged over 68% year-on-year to $62 million, adjusted net profit halved over the same period to just $6 million, which the company blamed on a significant spike in R&D and sales costs. Wang talks about “a flip side” to viral internet fame. “Because the hype gets so intense, it places a fair amount of pressure on our company and the industry as a whole,” he says. “Everyone starts expecting your technology to leap forward at a breakneck pace. But the truth is, deep tech breakthroughs require a certain amount of time.”
Meet Unitree’s GD01 Robot
Wang’s role leading that charge was evident when he appeared as the youngest member of a high-profile business symposium hosted by Xi last spring. More than 140 Chinese companies now make humanoid robots, yet the perception inside China is that Unitree is not just another robotics startup, but a hardware platform destined to replicate what BYD achieved for EVs and DJI did for drones. Wang’s strategy is simple but hard to beat: first, control the most difficult core components; leverage scale to relentlessly drive down costs; and use each product generation to unlock new markets.
While the G1 might not boast the peak performance of some Western competitors in terms of load bearing and durability, it has crossed the “good enough” threshold for real-world deployment. With the ability to carry 5-kg payloads for 10 to 15 minutes continuously without overheating, it is moving out of R&D labs and into pilot deployments for warehouse logistics and material handling.
Humanoid robot technology is still in its relatively early stages.——Wang Xingxing, Unitree CEOTourists watch the Unitree G1 humanoid robot performance by West Lake in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China on June 17, 2026. —CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty ImagesWang is unconcerned, however, and compares this trend to the early days of the personal computer, when they were primarily purchased by those in the business: “As the software becomes increasingly mature, with more developers joining each year, the proportion of genuine industrial deployments is growing at an incredibly fast pace.”
Achieving this milestone will require overcoming two self-reinforcing problems: the scarcity of 3D data and the diversity of deployment environments. Unlike LLMs like ChatGPT, which can parse the virtually boundless internet, robots need manipulation data collected in the real physical world, which is costly and difficult to scale. It must typically be collected manually by repetitively training machines how to perform certain tasks, such as folding shirts, stocking refrigerators, or shaking a mai tai. Plus, explains Jiang Zheyuan, CEO of Beijing-based humanoid firm Noetix, “even if a well-performing manipulation strategy is trained for a specific task, the success rate often drops sharply when the environment changes slightly—for example, object displacement, different lighting, or different tabletop materials.”
The H2 robot putting on a performance at the company's headquarters.
That battle is increasingly about one thing: collecting data. In New York City, for example, Micro AGI, which counts Unitree as a partner, is sending camera-wearing staff to clean apartments free of charge simply to generate 3D data to train its physical AI model. But as a dedicated robotics company, Unitree is arguably in a weaker position than Tesla, Xiaomi, or XPeng, which have diversified revenue streams and established supply chains. So solving this generalization gap is key to maintaining its status as today’s market champion. After all, its absolute sales are by any measure minuscule, meaning whoever closes the gap first could easily surge ahead.
Boosted connectivity would solve the robotics bottlenecks of weight and battery life. Navigating our world requires simultaneously processing 4K video, spatial lidar, audio, and delicate tactile or proprioceptive feedback. But carrying heavy computational hardware and the means to power it severely limits both robot agility and operating time. 6G could potentially combine cloud processing with network lag of a near instantaneous 0.1 to 1 millisecond. Suddenly, lightweight physical robots could be animated by a cloud-based AI brain operating in real time. When a robot fumbles, 6G provides a safety net via remote human teleoperation.
Then there is the fear, familiar from fiction, that machines built to act on our behalf might one day be made to act against us. Even today’s robots have shown physical AI carries physical risk: viral clips capture Unitree machines swinging an arm or a leg into unsuspecting children who stray into the path of their choreography. As humanoids graduate to generalization, whether they’ll become more cautious or more dangerous is a key question facing the industry. Wang plays down the potential for renegade robots to wreak havoc. “That won’t happen,” he says. “These robots are engineered with rigorous hardware constraints and safety protections.”
But the greatest obstacle to the household humanoid may not be technical. First proposed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, the “uncanny valley” hypothesis posits that as an object becomes more humanlike, our affection for it grows. Once it crosses a critical threshold—getting too close to human—our response plunges into revulsion. As firms experiment with anthropomorphic robots with real hair, it remains to be seen whether the valley can be bridged.
For all Unitree’s lead in the humanoid market, today’s machines remain strangely theatrical: bodies dressed as intelligence, rehearsing a role they have not yet learned to live. “Humanoid robot technology is still in its relatively early stages,” cautions Wang. “It will likely take some time before we see genuine, large-scale deployment. It won’t happen overnight.” Nearby, GD01—part prototype, part prophecy—stands sentinel, as if quietly rebuking his master’s prudence.
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