The latest news on OpenClaw, AI agents, and automation
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General Motors cut over 1,000 jobs at Factory Zero and installed 50 collaborative robots. Meanwhile, employers who previously laid off staff citing AI are reversing course after finding the technology could not consistently match human expertise. A Ramp study of 21,599 organizations found that companies with the highest AI adoption actually increased hiring by 10%.
Alibaba's Qwen3.7-Max model now controls robots through tool-calling for navigation, obstacle avoidance, and task planning. Tencent's OpenClaw framework powers the Zeroth M1 humanoid's speech-to-motion system. Chinese robotics startups have raised hundreds of millions in funding. UBS frames embodied AI as a major investor-backed growth frontier. The AI agent war has moved from screens to factory floors.
Figure AI completed a 200-hour continuous package sorting demonstration using its Figure 03 robots, processing 249,560 packages with zero human intervention. The run started as a planned eight-hour test and kept going for nine days. A human intern narrowly won the initial 10-hour head-to-head contest.
A WIRED journalist gave an OpenClaw agent control of a physical robot arm and it configured the hardware, identified objects by sight, and trained a secondary model for autonomous pick-and-place tasks. The experiment demonstrates code-as-policy, where AI coding models generate executable robot behaviors, eliminating the need for traditional teleoperation training.
Kodiak AI beat Q1 revenue expectations with $1.8 million in revenue and 28 driverless trucks in operation, then watched its stock fall 37% after selling $100 million in shares at a 29% discount to market price. The company is burning $35 million per quarter in free cash flow with full-year guidance of negative $155 million to $165 million.
JuliaHub closed a $65 million Series B led by Dorilton Capital, with General Catalyst and AE Ventures participating, to scale Dyad 3.0, an agentic AI platform that compresses industrial hardware design cycles from months to days. The platform deploys autonomous agents to build, simulate, and validate digital twins of physical systems, from heat pumps to satellites, marking one of the largest funding rounds targeting agentic AI for hardware engineering.
All3, founded by the team behind Russia's $1.5 billion Samokat food delivery exit, closed a $25 million seed round led by RTP Global to scale a full-stack construction automation platform. The system combines AI-driven design software, robotic fabrication, and an autonomous legged robot called Mantis for on-site assembly, with commercial deployment beginning in Germany.
Stuttgart-based Sereact closed a $110 million Series B led by Headline, with Bullhound Capital, Felix Capital, and Daphni joining as new investors. The company's vision language action models let robots predict task outcomes before executing them, a capability gap that separates current warehouse automation from truly autonomous physical agents.
Jeff Bezos' AI lab, code-named Project Prometheus, is close to finalizing a $10 billion funding round at a $38 billion post-money valuation. JPMorgan and BlackRock are among the lead investors. The company is building AI models that understand the physical world for manufacturing, aerospace, and robotics.
Humanoid's HMND 01 robot completed autonomous tote-handling tasks inside a Siemens electronics factory in Erlangen, Germany, hitting 60 moves per hour, 8+ hours of uptime, and above 90% pick-and-place success. Announced at Hannover Messe 2026, the deployment uses NVIDIA's full physical AI stack including Jetson Thor, Isaac Sim, and Isaac Lab. It is the most concrete proof of a humanoid robot performing real logistics work in an operational production facility.
The $14 billion robotics foundation model startup just bought an entire division from a NASDAQ-listed $5 billion enterprise. Skild AI's acquisition of Zebra Technologies' Robotics Automation business, including the Symmetry Fulfillment orchestration platform, gives a single company the full stack from robot learning to warehouse-scale fleet coordination.
Antioch lets robotics developers spin up digital instances of their hardware connected to simulated sensors, enabling reinforcement learning, edge case testing, and training data generation without building physical test environments. CEO Harry Mellsop says it's 'the first time you can have autonomous agents iterate on a physical autonomy system, and actually close the feedback loop.' The founding team includes alumni from Google DeepMind, Meta Reality Labs, and Chainalysis-acquired Transpose.
Google DeepMind's new robotics reasoning model can read pressure gauges, sight glasses, and digital readouts without instrument-specific training. Boston Dynamics is already shipping it inside Spot's inspection platform for industrial facilities.
Eclipse Ventures, the Palo Alto firm behind Cerebras, Wayve, and Redwood Materials, closed $1.3 billion in fresh capital split across a $591 million early-stage incubation fund and a larger growth fund. The thesis: AI agents are moving off screens and into the physical world. Eclipse plans to both invest in and incubate startups across transportation, energy, defense, compute, and infrastructure, building an interconnected portfolio where companies partner directly.
Hong Kong startup DeepMirror announced integration of OpenClaw as the upper-layer runtime for Unitree robots, positioning itself as the middleware between AI agent reasoning and physical-world execution. The company's architecture abstracts perception, navigation, manipulation, and cross-embodiment support into a runtime layer beneath OpenClaw, so agents can issue high-level goals like 'check whether the stove is off' without managing hardware-level control logic.
OpenClaw community developers have begun building AI agent integrations on the Rokid Glasses Developer Kit, marking one of the first confirmed deployments of autonomous AI agents on wearable hardware. Rokid VP Gary Cai confirmed the company is supporting the effort. The integration moves AI agents from screens to smart glasses with voice, camera, and spatial interaction capabilities.
OpenAI signed a lease for a 202,400-square-foot industrial warehouse at Richmond's Portside Commerce Center, county records show. The facility — previously vacant after battery startup Moxion Power collapsed — aligns with Business Insider's January report that OpenAI told employees it planned to open a second robotics lab in Richmond. The deal adds to over 1.6 million square feet of Bay Area space OpenAI has secured in recent months.
The two-year-old San Francisco robotics startup Physical Intelligence is in discussions to raise about $1 billion in new funding at a valuation exceeding $11 billion, according to Bloomberg. The deal would nearly double the company's $5.6 billion valuation from its November 2025 round, with Founders Fund expected to join returning backers Thrive Capital and Lux Capital.
Business Insider reports Chinese labs have integrated OpenClaw into Unitree's G1 humanoid robot for real-time command interpretation and physical navigation. A separate team demonstrated remote-controlling humanoid robots through orbital edge computing. OpenClaw just left the laptop.
NVIDIA's three-day GTC 2026 conference ended with Disney revealing Kamino, its GPU-accelerated simulator that trained a robotic Olaf to walk on a moving boat using deep reinforcement learning. T-Mobile announced an edge AI partnership for cell tower infrastructure, and Jensen Huang reiterated his $1 trillion revenue forecast through 2027.