A Chinese humanoid robot has run 100 metres in 9.39 seconds, surpassing the long-standing human world record of 9.58 seconds set by Jamaican sprinting legend Usain Bolt at the 2009 World Athletics Championships in Berlin. The feat was achieved at the second World Humanoid Robot Games, held at Beijing's National Speed Skating Oval — the venue built for the 2022 Winter Olympics — which opened on Saturday, August 22.
The winning robot, Tiangong Ultra, developed by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, overtook Honor's Lightning near the finish line after falling behind early in the race. Lightning, built by Chinese smartphone maker Honor, finished in 9.47 seconds — also faster than Bolt's record — and had separately clocked 9.32 seconds in a preparatory test run at a peak speed of 14.5 metres per second. The spectacle was not without incident: Tiangong Ultra stumbled wildly after crossing the finish line, forcing onlookers to scatter, while Lightning collapsed to the ground and was carried away on a stretcher. Also on the opening day, a robot from Beijing-based X-Humanoid cleared 2.88 metres in a standing high jump, surpassing the human record of 2.45 metres set by Cuba's Javier Sotomayor in 1993.
The improvement from last year's inaugural edition was dramatic: Tiangong Ultra won the 100 metres at the first games in 21.50 seconds. This year's competition has drawn 2,056 robots from 666 teams across 16 countries and six continents, with 51 events ranging from football and boxing to household tasks such as folding laundry. The games run through Wednesday, August 26.
The event takes place against a backdrop of intense geopolitical competition in advanced robotics. China has designated humanoid robots a strategic emerging industry, betting that advances in artificial intelligence and hardware will accelerate their deployment in manufacturing, logistics, and consumer applications. Investor enthusiasm has been striking: shares in Unitree, one of China's best-known humanoid robot makers, surged more than fivefold in their Shanghai trading debut this week, giving the company a market value of roughly $50 billion. Meanwhile, the United States Federal Communications Commission recently announced a ban on imports of new foreign-made humanoid robots, citing national security concerns in a move widely seen as targeting China, and the Pentagon added Unitree to a list of companies it considers to have ties with the Chinese military. Beijing has denied the accusations.
Experts caution that humanoid robots remain largely confined to demonstrations, performances, and research, and that mass real-world deployment is still some way off. Nevertheless, the scale and pace of progress on display in Beijing underscores how rapidly the technology is advancing — and how central it has become to the broader rivalry between the world's two largest economies.