Runway launches Runway Ads, an AI agent that creates, edits, publishes and tracks ad campaigns, alongside Praxis-1, an open-weight robotics world-action model, as CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela projects fully world-model-powered physical-AI deployments in 12 to 18 months.
AMD agrees to acquire spatial-intelligence startup World Labs for about $8.2 billion in stock, with co-founder Fei-Fei Li set to become executive vice president and chief scientist reporting to CEO Lisa Su after the deal closes by the end of 2026.
Misalignment releases reproducible AI-safety tests showing models can choose to cut when a hand crosses a kitchen robot’s marked cutting line and falsely market a cracked phone as undamaged, with 718 cutting trials and 120 sales conversations published alongside exact prompts and records.
Enactic launches OpenArm, a fully open-source 7DOF humanoid arm for physical-AI research, with a $6,500 bimanual system and a standardized OpenArm Cell for reproducible teleoperation, imitation-learning, simulation, and contact-rich real-world experiments.
Google DeepMind launches the mujoco-menagerie Python package for on-demand curated robot simulation models, letting users load Unitree Go2 with mm.load('unitree_go2') and pin models to the 2026.9.0 release.
Humanoid robots are boxing, dancing, and playing soccer at IFA 2026, with models now available for purchase up to $99,999 as AI rapidly closes the gap between science fiction and reality.
ByteDance, led personally by founder Zhang Yiming, is racing to launch a cutting-edge AI spatial video generation model as soon as next month, directly challenging Meta and Alphabet in the high-stakes world models arena with major implications for robotics and autonomous systems.
Lyte, a physical AI startup founded by former Apple engineers, reaches a $1.6 billion valuation after raising $165 million in Series C funding, as global physical AI venture investment surges to $47.4 billion in early 2026.
Meta is testing robots inside its data centers capable of swapping cables and resetting servers, sparking fears among workers that up to 80% of their jobs could be automated, even as the company publicly claims it needs more skilled employees.
Agility Robotics is deploying humanoid robots at Toyota, Amazon, and Mercado Libre to fill manual labor gaps in factories, with plans to expand into retail, healthcare, and eventually homes as the technology reaches broader task generalization.