The humanoid race

As of mid-2026 the race splits sharply between messaging and verified reality. Only a handful of firms have third-party-verified paid work at arm's-length customers; Agility and Figure lead there. Chinese makers dominate on price and volume: entry prices fall below $14,000, and two independent research houses have now counted the first half of 2026 separately. Smart Analytics Global puts 19,100 humanoids shipped worldwide, up 272% year on year, with AgiBot first at 8,400 and Unitree second at 5,900, and Chinese vendors at about 97% of the total. Counterpoint Research puts the same half above 22,000 units, up nearly 300%, with AgiBot first at 9,700 and Unitree second above 7,000. They disagree on the totals by roughly a sixth and agree on the order and the shares, which is worth more than either count alone. Both include wheeled humanoids alongside bipedal ones, so both run wider than this board's scope, and shipments are still not deployments. The best-evidenced unit figures here remain the issuer-disclosed ones: UBTech's 1H-2026 interim results, published 28 August 2026, book 921 full-size humanoids sold, up 1,946.7% year on year, against 1,079 for the whole of 2025. That is a reminder that a listed company's own accounts outrank any press release, even while UBTech's customer list stays the least verified of the volume leaders. Public markets have now put a price on that Chinese volume lead: Unitree listed in Shanghai on 19 August 2026, the first humanoid maker publicly traded in mainland China, and closed its first day up 460% at a market value near ¥342B (about $51B), well above any private valuation on this board. Read that number carefully, and note that the ~$66B figure in many headlines is the opening peak rather than the close. Nothing about Unitree's verified customers or deployments changed that day. The capital leaders compete on specs rather than deployment: Figure and NEURA have raised the most, yet NEURA has no verified field units. Tesla and XPeng, the two best-known names, remain at working-demo stage with no external customers, which did not stop XPeng's robotics arm raising more than $900M on 24 August 2026 at above $6.3B, the largest single private round yet in China's embodied-AI sector. Capital keeps arriving well ahead of deployment, on both sides of the Pacific.

The largest single move of recent weeks was regulatory, not technical: on 2026-07-28 the US FCC added foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots to its Covered List, blocking import authorization for new models. Models already authorized and machines already sold are unaffected, but the newest and cheapest Chinese humanoids now have no clear route into the US market. It does not change any availability score on this board today; it does change where the cheap end of the field can be bought.

Three recurring traps this page tries to avoid: quoted prices are usually aspirational targets, not sale prices; "customers" are often investors, research partners, or captive parents; and headline unit figures conflate production, shipments, orders, and actual deployments. Genuine paid autonomous labor exists, but it is small-scale, geographically concentrated, and narrower than the sector's collective messaging implies. See the predictions register →

Every row above comes from one file: data/humanoid-race/current.json. It carries the fields the table shows: maker, model, price, availability stage, verified customers, units in field. The source URL is kept on each claim. No API key, no signup, no email wall. The changelog records what changed and when.

Licensed CC BY 4.0: republish the table, chart it, or fork the file, with credit and a link. Commercial use is fine. Suggested form: Moduloa humanoid-robot race tracker, as of 2026-08-31, moduloa.com/humanoid-race.

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