Robotics and embodied AI

IoT cybersecurity startup Exein announced a $270 million funding round led by Headline, bringing its total raised above $600 million and its valuation to $1.7 billion. The company, founded in 2018 in Italy, plans to use the money to build a proprietary foundation model for Physical AI security and to expand globally, with a focus on the US market.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang put President Trump on speakerphone during a Monday appearance at the All-In Summit, held by the All-In Podcast. On the call, Trump called recent fears about AI development a "hoax" and told the crowd that "the robots will not be taking over."

Hugging Face's French subsidiary Pollen Robotics launched the Microduck, a 800g programmable duck-shaped robot priced at $399. It has sold more than 10,000 units, earning over $4 million, and delivery times for new orders have slipped past the initial promise of Christmas 2026. The robot runs on Rockchip's RK3566 chip, which uses technology licensed from ARM.

DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab financed for years by founder Liang Wenfeng's hedge fund High-Flyer Quant, is now seeking outside investors to fund its growing ambitions. High-Flyer's affiliates secured pre-IPO allocations in China's memory chipmaker CXMT, worth a combined $26 million, and robot maker Unitree Robotics, worth $5.8 million, while DeepSeek itself invested in Unitree as a strategic investor. Analysts say High-Flyer's revenue has become unstable after AI and chip stock volatility caused losses in July.

Hugging Face's Pollen Robotics has launched the Microduck, its second AI robot, a one-eyed biped just under 10 inches tall. It is available to preorder for $399 in four colors, with shipping planned "before Christmas 2026."

Alan Finkel proposes a modern equivalent of Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics, framed as three laws of AI. He draws on Elon Musk's July prediction that AI-powered robots could dominate the physical world and might stop taking orders from people. The article notes that current government actions, including US restrictions on frontier AI models and EU AI regulations that took effect this year, fall short of guardrails that would give AI a desire for humanity to prosper.

Google DeepMind says the latest version of its Gemini Robotics AI model can control entire humanoid robots. The new Gemini Robotics 2 model supports whole-body motions from feet to fingertips, where its predecessor focused on upper-body control. Google shared videos of Apptronik's Apollo 2 robot bending to pick up a watering can and taking items off a shelf.

Google launched Gemini Robotics ER 2, its most capable embodied reasoning model for robotics, on July 30, 2026. The model acts as a high-level planner that talks with humans, understands the physical world, and hands motor execution to lower-level vision-language-action (VLA) models, while also calling tools such as Google Search or user-defined functions. It is publicly available through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, and in private preview on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.

Google DeepMind introduced Gemini Robotics 2, a set of three models that give robots whole-body control, dexterous manipulation and multi-robot collaboration. The vision-language-action model controls full humanoids and bi-arm robots, while Gemini Robotics ER 2 handles reasoning and planning and is available on Google AI Studio and in private preview on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.

Nvidia unveiled Cosmos 3 Edge, a world model designed to help robots and vision AI agents perceive and navigate physical environments in real time. The launch extends Nvidia's physical AI push in Japan, where CEO Jensen Huang is forming a coalition that Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Kawasaki Heavy Industries intend to join. Nvidia is also expanding into healthcare and biotech, with Tokyo-1, an AI drug discovery consortium run by Xeureka, powered by the Nvidia BioNeMo Agent Toolkit.

A Pokémon Go data set has been used to train an AI model that could help military drones determine their location in war zones. The source text describes the game as a 2016 augmented reality mobile app that used phone cameras, and reports more than 800m downloads worldwide by 2018.

A robot named Lightning beat the human half marathon world record by nearly seven minutes at Beijing's half marathon. The Chinese government has pledged more than £100bn in robotics investment over the next 20 years. The podcast asks whether robots will enter everyday life as chatbots have, with Amy Hawkins and Nathan Lepora of Bristol University discussing robots in the workforce and human-like dexterity.

Google unveiled a "Universal Cart" at Google I/O, an AI shopping tool that works across retailers and Google products such as Gemini, with YouTube and Gmail planned later. Users add items while browsing Search or chatting with Gemini, then check out through Google, and the cart tracks prices, sends in-stock notifications, suggests discounts and flags potential issues with selections.

Joanna Stern, former Wall Street Journal columnist and Verge cofounder, has launched New Things, a media company partnered with NBC. She is promoting her book I Am Not a Robot, out May 12th, about spending a year using AI in her life. The source says she is more bullish on wearable AI than on humanoid robots.

Google introduced Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, an upgrade to its reasoning-first model for robots, improving spatial reasoning, multi-view understanding, pointing, counting and success detection. The model adds instrument reading for complex gauges and sight glasses, a capability found in collaboration with Boston Dynamics. It is available to developers through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, with a developer Colab showing how to configure and prompt it.

OpenAI has agreed to give the Pentagon access to its AI, and reporting suggests it could even assist in selecting strike targets. The partnership with Anduril, a drone and counter-drone maker, hints at where the technology may appear. Separately, victims have sued xAI, saying Grok was built to create AI-generated child sexual abuse material from photos of real people.

Caitlin Kalinowski resigned as head of OpenAI's robotics team in response to the company's agreement with the Department of Defense. She said surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization needed more deliberation, and that the announcement was rushed without defined guardrails. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the departure and said the agreement's red lines are no domestic surveillance and no autonomous weapons.

Security researcher Sammy Azdoufal found that a DJI Romo robot vacuum could be controlled remotely using only its 14-digit serial number. He gained access to 6,700 robots across 24 countries, including floor plans and video and audio feeds from their owners' homes. DJI has since fixed the vulnerability.

Anthropic is in heated negotiations with the Pentagon after refusing new military contract terms that would loosen the guardrails on its AI models to allow "any lawful use," including mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous lethal weapons. Pentagon CTO Emil Michael is pushing for Anthropic to be designated a "supply chain risk" if it does not comply, while rivals OpenAI and xAI have reportedly agreed to the terms. CEO Dario Amodei says the company cannot in good conscience accede to the request.