Humanoid Robot Beats Usain Bolt's 100m Record in Beijing Trial
Tiangong Ultra ran the 100 meters in 9.39 seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games, beating Usain Bolt's 9.58-second record set in 2009.
Usain Bolt's 100-meter world record stood for 17 years. A humanoid robot in Beijing just beat it.
The numbers
In a preliminary heat on Saturday at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, Tiangong Ultra — built by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center — ran the 100-meter dash in 9.39 seconds. That's faster than Bolt's 9.58-second mark, set in 2009 and still the fastest 100m ever run by a human.
A second robot, Lightning, developed by Honor, crossed the line close behind at 9.47 seconds — also inside Bolt's record.
This was a competition heat time at the World Humanoid Robot Games, not a result submitted to or ratified by any formal athletics record-keeping body — see "What's unknown" below.
Why it matters
For robotics as a category: a sub-9.5-second 100m by a bipedal humanoid robot is a concrete, easy-to-grasp signal of how fast legged locomotion and actuator technology are advancing. Sprinting at this speed requires balance, torque, and control systems operating well beyond what humanoid robots were capable of even a couple of years ago.
For China's humanoid robot industry: the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing is itself a statement — a dedicated competition circuit for humanoid robots signals serious state and industry investment in the category, with Chinese developers like the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center and Honor fielding competitive entries.
For the AI-robotics convergence: humanoid robots are as much an AI story as a mechanical one — the control systems that let a robot sprint without falling depend on the same kind of real-time perception and motor-control models driving other embodied-AI efforts. A headline-grabbing feat like beating a decades-old human sprint record is the kind of moment that tends to pull more attention and capital into the space.
What's unknown
The reporting doesn't specify the full field of competitors, the track or timing methodology used, or whether Tiangong Ultra's run will be recognized under any formal record-keeping body the way human athletics records are. It's also unclear how these robots perform outside a controlled competition heat — over longer distances, on uneven terrain, or in repeated runs.
What to watch
- Whether Tiangong Ultra's or Lightning's time is corroborated or repeated in later rounds of the Games
- How the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center and Honor plan to apply this locomotion tech beyond athletic demonstrations
- Whether other humanoid robot makers — including US and Japanese firms — respond with competing sprint attempts
- Broader results from the World Humanoid Robot Games across other events
Source: The Verge
NextGen AI Digest Editorial
Editorial Team
Reporting and analysis from the NextGen AI Digest newsroom — covering AI, agentic systems, SaaS, and the future of technology. Every piece is factual, sourced, and cited. Built and published by the team at Peaders.
Keep reading
China's Kimi K3 Goes Fully Open This Week — A 2.8-Trillion-Parameter Model
Moonshot AI is set to release Kimi K3's full weights, making the largest open-weight model ever built publicly downloadable — and it already beats Claude Opus 4.8 on key benchmarks.
Claude Opus 5 Lands, Approaching Fable 5 Performance at Half the Cost
Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 ships at unchanged Opus pricing while more than doubling Opus 4.8's score on Frontier-Bench and getting within 0.5% of Claude Fable 5 on coding at half the cost.
OpenAI Suspends Its Next Model, Astra, Over Cybersecurity Risk
OpenAI paused development of Astra after internal testing showed its cyber capabilities approaching a 'critical' risk threshold — the model can't rule out finding 0-day exploits without human help.