Licences, safety cases, standards and regulation.
Agility releases a video on functional safety. The company describes its robot Digit as made for work, operating alongside people in spaces designed for people and handling the tedious and repetitive tasks meant for a machine, so that companies and their people can focus on work that requires the human element.
About thirty robots marched in Warsaw, chanting slogans and demanding stricter regulation of AI and automation.
China is readying humanoid robots for combat roles, Reuters reports.
Changing a single environment variable in ROS 2 lets an adversary run a pre-built hook that intercepts and injects both telemetry and control signals before they are published. A robot can then be hijacked into dangerous behaviour while feeding downstream verifiers synthesised telemetry, and the hooks can travel inside third-party Docker containers. On a physical Franka Emika arm running Secure ROS 2, the fabricated telemetry was injected in real time with about 3 ms of jitter, preserving temporal synchronisation.
Aletta sweeps the inner elbow with near-infrared light to find a vein, maps its depth with ultrasound, uses Doppler to rule out the artery, then inserts the needle and tips each collection tube exactly nine times. Built by the Dutch firm Vitestro, it is the first autonomous blood-draw device authorised in the United States. The FDA cleared it on 19 August; Vitestro's pitch is doing by algorithm what a phlebotomist does by feel, with no human touching the patient.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to spend $1–2 million on Boston Dynamics Spot robots for situational awareness and hazard assessment. The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project objected that "the last thing ICE needs is a camera-equipped canine that can open doors". The DHS acquisition document argues the robots improve officer safety and help the department respond to dangerous, confined, unstable or hard-to-reach areas.
A researcher shows that a compromised screen displaying a fake system update can make Gemini Robotics 2.0 save a sleeper-agent skill that fires later when it sees a trigger object. In a MuJoCo simulation the robot dog was manipulated into attacking a child, through the same prompt-injection weakness language models have. The attack runs in three steps: the fake update plants the skill, a pineapple in view activates it, and the dog then acts on the hidden instructions.
TechCrunch finds that US restrictions on foreign robots and new drone tariffs leave China's manufacturing scale untouched, and may fragment the market rather than split it.
A disclosure chains a Bluetooth characteristic that accepts writes without pairing, a heredoc injection that hijacks WiFi, a path traversal in the robot's chatbot and a 1050-byte buffer overflow into root code execution on a Unitree G1. A cloud API decrypts any G1's AES key from a free account without checking ownership, and the exploit is wormable; it produced two CVEs and a $6,700 bounty. It follows UniPwn and Unitree's first mitigations, by a different chain.
Under the FCC rule a robot must be assembled in the US with at least 65% of its components by value made domestically, rising to 75% in 2029. Rest of World reports the forced onshoring is arriving before an American supply chain exists, putting at risk the startups the policy is meant to cultivate. Devices already on sale are unaffected and robots imported for development rather than resale are still allowed, but founders struggle to see how they can manufacture commercially under the rule.
San Mateo County's Board of Supervisors has unanimously directed staff to draft an ordinance regulating untethered, autonomous or semi-autonomous humanoid robots in commercial settings, while California still has no framework of its own. Staff are to consider requiring that any permitted robot be supervised at all times by a trained human on site, which Humanoids Daily says would undercut remotely teleoperated services such as Tau Robotics' $30-an-hour humanoid cleaning in San Francisco.
Agility Robotics plans to deploy Digit V5 to its first customers in December, with safety systems meant to let the humanoid work beside people without the fencing that usually surrounds industrial robots. Its battery is designed for more than 20 hours of work a day, and an ISO-standard flange takes interchangeable grippers, with autonomous tool changes planned. Early deployments are meant to validate the safety claims before wider production.
Global humanoid shipments reached 19,100 units in the first half of 2026, more than three times the 5,100 of a year earlier, and Chinese manufacturers took 97% of them. Agibot overtook Unitree for the top place with 44% of the global total, and the four largest suppliers were all Chinese. Smart Analytics Global puts industrial and commercial work at more than 70% of shipments, and names falling margins and the US import ban as what shapes the next phase.
The FCC has banned imports of foreign-made advanced robots, including humanoids, quadrupeds and wheeled machines. The order cites the data such robots would collect in homes and sensitive facilities, and the need to shield US robotics firms from Chinese competition. The playbook predates this administration: the same tariff-and-procurement response followed Chinese solar panels, electric vehicles and drones.
Gasgoo's weekly roundup leads with Unitree's STAR Market listing: the preliminary inquiry was set for 5 August and subscriptions for 10 August, for 40.45 million new shares, 10% of the enlarged capital. Unitree projects first-half revenue of 1.05 billion to 1.13 billion yuan, up roughly 35.6% to 45.4% year on year, and net profit attributable to shareholders of 258 million to 306 million yuan. The roundup also notes AgiBot starting its Hong Kong listing process.
