China builds, America demos: what 108 makers tell you
Chinese makers account for 65 of the 182 humanoids in our record and 31 of the 44 you can order. American makers hold the money, the research and most of the autonomy claims, and sell you almost nothing.
Of the 182 humanoid robots in our record, 65 come from Chinese makers and 44 from American ones. Of the 44 you can order today, 31 are Chinese and 5 are American, and all 5 American ones are preorders. On 4 September 2026 no US maker has a machine in stock. That is the shape of the market. The detail is less one-sided.
Who builds, and who lists
The maker count is close: 33 American companies against 30 Chinese in our list of 108. But 9 of the 33 American entries are universities, MIT and UC Berkeley among them. China’s 30, 20 of them startups, put 65 machines in the record against 44.
Of the 65 Chinese machines, 48 were first shown in 2024 or later; of the American 44, 18 were. On status, 34 Chinese machines are logged as commercial. One American machine is, Digit v4, and Agility leases it rather than selling it. Twelve American entries are retired and eleven are research platforms.
The order button is mostly Chinese
In stock or on preorder: China 31, the United States 5. China has 28 in stock and 3 on preorder; the US has 0 in stock and 5 on preorder. Seventeen Chinese makers will take an order. Four American ones will: K-Scale Labs with the Z-Bot at $999, Hugging Face with HopeJR at $3,000, Weave Robotics with Isaac 1 at $7,999 and 1X with NEO at $20,000. All four are logged as teleoperated or partly so. NEO’s Expert Mode hands the robot to 1X staff; Weave says remote operators finish what Isaac cannot.
Nineteen of the 31 Chinese buyable machines carry a price we can point at, from $299 for the Robosen K1 Pro, a walking toy, to $63,000 for the Robotera Q5. The median is $13,700, next to the Unitree G1 at $13,500 and the EngineAI PM01 at $13,700; the Unitree R1 is $4,900. Ten Chinese buyable machines are 150 cm or taller; the two American ones, NEO and Isaac 1, are undelivered.
Two cautions on the Chinese side. Twelve of the 31 sit at a distributor with no published price, so in stock means a quote. And 40 of the 65 Chinese machines are logged as partly teleoperated, with 22 more unknown. One Chinese record says no teleoperation.
Where the United States leads
Money. Counting disclosed rounds to makers in our record, American companies raised $5,400,500,000 across 18 rounds. Chinese makers raised $1,021,000,000 across 8, with 11 more rounds undisclosed. Figure alone took $1,000,000,000 at a $39,000,000,000 valuation on 16 September 2025, nearly the total of all eight disclosed Chinese rounds. The largest Chinese round is AgiBot at $293,000,000, for control of a listed company. The caveat: Chinese capital runs through the state. Beijing’s CNY 100 billion fund, about $13,800,000,000, covers robotics, AI and information industries together, with no humanoid line item.
Deployments, with a twist. China has 22 in the record, the US 18. But 8 American deployments are logged as autonomous, against 2 Chinese: Digit at GXO’s Spanx warehouse in Georgia since October 2023, Apollo at Jabil, Figure 02 at BMW Spartanburg, electric Atlas announced for Hyundai’s Georgia plant. Eighteen of the 22 Chinese deployments are logged as mixed, including the Walker S1 and Walker S2 line at BYD, Zeekr and Foxconn.
Research. Both research milestones logged for 2024 to 2026 are American: Figure’s Helix model and Nvidia’s GR00T N1.
What “America demos” means in the record
Of the milestones logged for 2024 to 2026, 25 involve American makers and 17 Chinese. The American ones break down into 8 general milestones, 5 reveals, 3 partnerships, 3 funding rounds and 3 demos: Figure 01 handing over an apple on 13 March 2024, Optimus pouring drinks on 10 October 2024, later confirmed as remotely operated, and Atlas sorting engine parts on 30 October 2024 without teleoperation. The Chinese entries include 8 reveals, 3 competitions, 2 deployments and 1 demo, sixteen H1 robots dancing at the Spring Festival Gala on 28 January 2025. China reveals and races; America demos, raises and publishes. AgiBot logged its 1,000th unit off the line in January 2025. No American maker has a comparable count in the record.
| China | United States | |
|---|---|---|
| Makers in the record | 30 | 33 (9 universities) |
| Machines in the record | 65 | 44 |
| First shown 2024 or later | 48 | 18 |
| Status commercial | 34 | 1 |
| Buyable (in stock or preorder) | 31 | 5 |
| In stock today | 28 | 0 |
| Buyable with a published price | 19 | 4 |
| Buyable price range | $299 to $63,000 | $999 to $20,000 |
| Deployments in the record | 22 | 18 |
| Deployments logged autonomous | 2 | 8 |
| Disclosed funding, makers in record | $1.02 billion, 8 rounds | $5.40 billion, 18 rounds |
| Milestones 2024 to 2026 | 17 | 25 |
If you are buying from Europe
Read the shipping line first. Of the four American preorders with a buy record, one ships outside the US: HopeJR, a pair of open-source arms you assemble. NEO, Isaac 1 and Z-Bot list US delivery only. Digit, Apollo, Figure 03 and Atlas have no order path at all. Of the 28 Chinese buy records, 21 list global shipping, freight or a sales route abroad. The only European full-size option with a price is Pollen’s Reachy 2 at $70,000.
So a European buying a humanoid this year is buying Chinese, and should budget for the teleoperation the record says comes with it. EU AI Act high-risk obligations are scheduled from 2 August 2026 and the Machinery Regulation from January 2027, and both apply to a humanoid sold in the EU whatever its maker’s flag. If what you need is an autonomy record with a named customer, the American machines have it, and the price of that record is a sales call rather than an order.
Unitree G1
G1 is Unitree's compact humanoid, announced in May 2024 at USD 16,000 and now listed at USD 13,500. Its low price and open SDK made it the default research and education humanoid worldwide. Read the configuration carefully: the standard machine does not support your own code, and the EDU version that does starts at USD 43,900.
Unitree R1
R1 is Unitree's low-cost humanoid, launched in July 2025 at CNY 39,900. At roughly a third of the G1 price it pushed the entry price for a walking humanoid below USD 6,000.
Unitree H1
H1 is Unitree's first full-size humanoid, revealed in August 2023. It set a walking speed of 3.3 m/s and performed the first standing backflip by a full-size electric humanoid in March 2024. Sixteen H1 units danced on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala in January 2025.
EngineAI PM01
PM01 is EngineAI's 1.38 m humanoid sold at CNY 88,000, with a design that includes a chest display. It was the first humanoid shown doing a standing front flip.
AgiBot Lingxi X2
Lingxi X2 is a 1.3 m interactive humanoid that AgiBot showed riding a bicycle at launch. It targets education, entertainment and research buyers.
Robosen K1 Pro
The K1 Pro is a programmable walking toy robot with 17 servos and app-based coding. It is the cheapest thing in this catalogue that walks on two legs unaided, and it is a toy, sold as one.
Robotera Q5
Q5 is Robotera's compact wheeled service humanoid for commercial interaction and education settings.
UBTech Walker S1
Walker S1 is the 2024 industrial humanoid that UBTech placed in several Chinese car and electronics plants. It is 172 cm tall, carries up to 15 kg and works with AMRs for material handling.
UBTech Walker S2
Walker S2 is UBTech's 2025 industrial humanoid and the first to swap its own battery, allowing round-the-clock operation. It has 52 degrees of freedom and is the product behind UBTech's large 2025 order announcements.
NEO
NEO is 1X's consumer home humanoid, opened for preorder on 28 October 2025 at USD 20,000 with deliveries planned for 2026. It is about 30 kg, tendon-driven and wears a soft suit, and it uses remote human operators for tasks it cannot yet do autonomously. It is the first humanoid marketed directly to households at a published price.
Weave Isaac 1
Isaac 1 is a wheeled home robot with two arms that collects and folds laundry, makes beds and resets rooms. At $7,999 it is the cheapest home robot with a stated delivery date, and the wheeled base is the reason: no legs means far less cost and far less that can go wrong.
Z-Bot
Z-Bot is K-Scale Labs' small, low-cost open-source humanoid, sold from 2025 as a developer and education kit for about USD 999.
HopeJR
HopeJR is a low-cost open-source humanoid announced by Hugging Face with The Robot Studio in May 2025, with 66 degrees of freedom and a target price of about USD 3,000. It is aimed at hobbyists and researchers using Hugging Face's LeRobot library.
Digit (v1 to v3)
Digit added a torso, arms and perception to the Cassie legs and was first shown in February 2019. Ford bought the first two units in 2020 for last-mile delivery research, and v2 and v3 added better perception and hands-free manipulation of totes. These versions were superseded by the 2023 Digit.
Digit
The 2023 Digit added a head, improved hands and a taller frame, and is the version Agility Robotics sells as a service for moving totes in warehouses. It was the first humanoid with a paid, multi-year commercial deployment (GXO, 2024) and is built at Agility's RoboFab factory. Schaeffler invested in Agility in 2024 and planned to deploy Digit in its plants.
Apollo
Apollo is Apptronik's general-purpose humanoid, revealed on 23 August 2023, with a 25 kg payload and four-hour swappable batteries. It is piloted by Mercedes-Benz, GXO and Jabil, and Google DeepMind has partnered with Apptronik on its AI. Apptronik's team previously worked on NASA's Valkyrie.
Figure 02
Figure 02, unveiled on 6 August 2024, added onboard speech, six cameras, 16 DoF hands and three times the compute of Figure 01. It became the first Figure robot to work in a customer plant, at BMW Spartanburg, and the platform for the Helix vision-language-action model. Figure retired it in favour of Figure 03 in late 2025.
Figure 03
Figure 03 is Figure AI's third-generation humanoid, unveiled on 9 October 2025 and designed for the home and for volume manufacturing at Figure's BotQ facility. It has soft textile coverings, wireless charging, palm cameras and tactile fingertips, and runs the Helix model onboard. It is the company's first robot designed for mass production rather than hand assembly.
Atlas (electric)
The electric Atlas, revealed on 17 April 2024, replaced the hydraulic Atlas with a fully electric design whose joints rotate through 360 degrees. Boston Dynamics is developing it as a commercial factory robot with Hyundai Motor Group and using large behavior models from Toyota Research Institute and Google DeepMind. A production-intent version was unveiled at CES in January 2026.
Optimus Gen 2
Optimus Gen 2, revealed on 12 December 2023, is about 10 kg lighter than Gen 1, walks 30 percent faster and has Tesla-designed actuators, an actuated neck and tactile fingers. It has been used for internal factory trials and at Tesla marketing events, where it was partly teleoperated. It is the version the public has seen most.
Reachy 2
Reachy 2 is an open-source humanoid with two arms, an expressive head and a mobile base from Pollen Robotics of Bordeaux, designed for VR teleoperation and AI research. Hugging Face acquired Pollen in April 2025 and sells Reachy 2 alongside its LeRobot software.
Sources
- 01Unitree G1 product pageUnitree
- 02UBTech official siteUBTech
- 03AgiBot official siteAgiBot
- 04
- 05NEO1X
- 06Agility RoboticsAgility Robotics
- 07EU AI Act implementation timelineFuture of Life Institute
How a humanoid robot works: actuators, compute, sensors and the model
Of 182 humanoids on record, 178 say what moves the joints and 43 say what computer is inside. The further a layer sits from the metal, the less the maker tells you about it.
How long does a humanoid robot actually run
22 of 182 humanoids on record quote a runtime. The claims run from 1 to 8 hours with a median of 4, and of the 44 machines you can order, 4 say anything at all.
Deposits, lead times and warranties: reading a humanoid order sheet
Of 42 buy records, 2 publish a deposit, 1 a warranty, 1 a shipping cost and none a lead time in weeks. The order sheet for a humanoid is mostly blank, and the blanks are where the money goes.