As sordid tales of AI layoffs and automation grip the news cycle, one group is fighting fire with fire, by staging an anti-AI demonstration with dozens of humanoid robots.

The rally, first reported by Agence France-Presse, was organized by the Polish group Democratism. It featured some 30 robots waving flags calling for swift regulation of AI. Staged outside the offices of Poland’s Digital Affairs Ministry in Warsaw, the organizers told reporters they used the robots to demonstrate the current state of robotics and AI. Though humanoid robots remain in their infancy, the robots gathered together do make for a striking display.

Around 30 robots joined a protest in front of Poland’s digital affairs ministry, calling for stronger AI regulations.

The demonstration was organised by campaigners to spark debate on how AI and robots could replace workers. pic.twitter.com/QEbvchb2RS

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 7, 2026

“The robots present here are meant to show that this technology is already a reality,” the organizers told AFP via an Agibot A3, which contains voice-recognition capabilities integrated with a large language model.

“We particularly want to address the issue of the potential replacement of people both by humanoid robots and by artificial intelligence in cognitive work,” Democratism organizer Grzegorz Kuliś told the news service. “If we don’t react now, we may soon have a problem… these robots can already move around freely, they’re already ‘protesting.'”

Notably, Kuliś is the chief information officer and owner of a company called Delta Robots, meaning the demonstration also serves to drum up press for his own commercial interests. Kuliś’ altruistic motivations notwithstanding, plenty of major AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have taken to using scare tactics to promote the supposedly advanced capabilities of their own products — while calling for stricter regulation of their own industry.

Whether the Polish robotics wiz is following in the self-serving footsteps of Sam Altman remains to be seen. But either way, it marks the first known use of humanoid robots for a political demonstration — and it surely won’t be the last.

More on robots: Humanoid Robot Fights Back After Getting Shoved

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The companies ushering in food delivery robots aren’t buying themselves much goodwill in the Windy City.

In the short amount of time they’ve been on Chicago streets, the bots have sent residents to the hospital and smashed through bus stops, prompting local officials to set up an exclusion zone prohibiting the companies from operating in a certain section of the city.

Now, it seems the bots are also capable of swarming the city’s busy sidewalk, making it all but impossible for residents to pass safely.

A clip shared by Chicago resident Becca Ostein on her morning run captured the bizarre moment when a swarm of delivery robots operated by the firm Coco caused a traffic jam on a sidewalk near Lincoln Park.

Apparently caused by a freak glitch, the video shows Ostein attempting to pass a veritable obstacle course of a dozen squirming robots, their on-board lights flashing as they congregate on a patch of narrow sidewalk. Another bot is seen maneuvering off in the distance, though it isn’t clear whether it’s approaching or fleeing the fray.

“Run route was crowded this morning,” Ostein wrote in her caption of the video.

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The video garnered plenty of reactions in the comments, the majority of which were negative.

“As a disabled person this is an actual nightmare,” one user replied.

“They were swarming,” Ostein told CBS News in an interview following the incident. “They didn’t seem to have anywhere to go. Without agile feet, no one could have gotten by.”

In a statement shared under Ostein’s post, Coco apologized, admitting “that’s not how our robots are designed to operate.”

“Our team caught it quickly, and the robots were cleared and operating normally within minutes,” the company continued. “We’ve made sure this won’t happen again.”

More on robots: As If There Was Any Question About Data Centers Being Weak Job Creators, Meta Is Now Deploying Robots to Maintain Them

The post Bizarre Glitch Causes Delivery Robots to Swarm Busy City Sidewalk appeared first on Futurism.

The surveillance state costs money, people!

Well, tell that to president Trump. On Thursday, he slapped a 100 percent tariff — he sure loves round numbers and levying imports — on larger foreign-made drones.

Trump claimed that this “bolsters national security.” But, ironically, it could be undermining domestic security — at least according to surveillance-happy police departments who’ve gotten used to overlooking their subjects from above, according to a roundup of commentary from Ars Technica.

Speaking to the New York Times, Scott Mlakar, chief of the Lake County Drone Unit outside Cleveland, called the tariffs financially onerous and lamented that it would prevent many communities from buying them, adding that his unit uses them to hunt crime suspects at night and search for lost children.

“Most of this, in our humble opinion, is lobbying by US manufacturers to eliminate foreign competition,” he said. “This is not national security. It’s protectionism.”

The tariff is explicitly designed to target popular Chinese drones, while making exceptions or imposing much lighter tariffs on drones made from allies like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and the EU.  In particular, these steep duties will apply to drones that use thermal imaging or weigh more than 55 pounds. In addition, the Federal Communications Commission is weighing reclassifying some drone technologies like lidar as “military grade,” Ars noted, which would restrict who can access these drones even further.

Drones have a lot of other practical uses beyond law enforcement, obviously, including monitoring wild fires and assisting rescue operations. Amid heightened backlash against Flock, though, they’ve come to be seen as another surveillance apparatus.

But weaning the US off Chinese drone tech is supposed to be good for national security, according to the Trump administration. One small problem: a single Chinese company, DJI, makes more than 70 percent of the world’s commercial drones, according to the NYT. Good luck replacing all those.

Plenty of other cops are bellyaching about the tariffs, too, extolling how irreplaceable that awesome Chinese made drones have become to their operation.

Ars spotted a Texas police officer named Jason Lee, for instance, who complained to the FCC that “there is currently no economically viable domestic replacement” for DJI drones. “More than 80 percent of state and local law-enforcement drone programs surveyed in 2024 used DJI aircraft,” he added.

“The fact that a domestic product exists does not necessarily mean it is a viable substitute,” Lee said. “A replacement must be operationally comparable, economically obtainable, supported by an adequate supply chain, and accepted by pilots who must rely on it during real-world incidents.”

More on drones: Amazon Delivery Drone Drops Package Directly Into Customer’s Swimming Pool

The post Surveillance-Happy Police In Shambles After Trump Tariffs Makes Drones Absurdly Expensive appeared first on Futurism.

While they’re seemingly still years away from completing actually useful tasks, like cleaning a messy apartment or doing the dishes, humanoid robots have developed plenty of capabilities over the past few years, from sprinting faster than any human ever to performing elaborate dance choreographies.

They’ve also been taught how to punch and even kickbox for their human overlords’ amusement, as one man visiting a store in Russia appears to have learned the hard way.

A viral CCTV video shows the individual lightly shoving what appears to be a Chinese Unitree G1 humanoid robot. After it recoils slightly, it suddenly starts playing cheesy fighting music and pops into a wide-legged stance, ready to pounce. Two store clerks then try to restrain the robot as it tries to throw technical, high-legged kicks.

Robot consultant glitches and ATTACKS customer in Russia's Saratov

The customer escaped with a fright, while robot Syoma was sent for a reboot pic.twitter.com/tGYUhj4KPV

— RT (@RT_com) September 2, 2026

One kick appears to hit a target, in the form of one of the clerk’s nether regions.

Twenty seconds later, the robotic assailant’s moves come to an abrupt end as it suddenly lifts up its arms as if to strike a T pose.

“They gave that thing a kung-fu beat down mode I’m in tears,” one X user wrote.

Other netizens took a far more serious tone.

“Not long now robots will be ripping peoples arms off in public,” one tweeted.

But it’d be far too soon to officially declare the beginning of a real robot uprising. The footage leaves us with far more questions than answers. We don’t know if the robot was being controlled remotely, for example, or following a predetermined sequence of actions as part of a tech demonstration.

Of course, it’s also entirely possible the entire confrontation was scripted and designed to get views on social media.

While it doesn’t appear to have resulted in any serious injuries, it wouldn’t have been the first time we’ve seen somebody get hurt by a humanoid robot. For instance, we’ve come across a video of a robot in a clown wig roundhousing kicking an innocent child, or another hit a man in the nose, causing him to bleed.

More on humanoid robots: Chinese Companies Are Unleashing AI-Powered Robo-Chefs

The post Humanoid Robot Fights Back After Getting Shoved appeared first on Futurism.

Since the start of the data center boom, “job creation” was one of the key promises made to communities weighing whether to host the tech industry’s monstrous computing facilities in their backyards.

That was always a gross over-representation of the facts, as most labor required for data centers comes in the form of temporary construction jobs to build them. Still, the tech tycoons who need data centers to keep the AI revolution chugging along could always fall back on promoting the lonely skeleton crews tasked with manually monitoring, patrolling, and maintaining each facility.

Now, even that could be going away.

According to new reporting by Ars Technica, the AI giant Meta is testing new robots designed to automate the work of data center maintenance, with the aim of keeping the cost of labor even lower.

The initiative is in its very early stages, per Ars, involving trial runs of hardware from a few different robotics firms. These include companies like ABB, Kinova, and Watney Robotics, which supply robot arms being tested for tasks like hot-swapping network cables and cycling power to server racks.

One anonymous Meta staffer told Ars that, if it’s successful, a robotic arm from Kinova could replace up to 80 percent of their the facilities’ workload.

“We thought those of us performing the physical tasks were safe for a while, but not anymore,” the worker lamented. “It’s coming for us all, unfortunately.”

The bulk of data center overhead comes from the hardware itself, particularly the extremely pricey AI chips needed to run high-powered large language models. Even when factoring in construction the human labor cost of data centers is negligible, meaning Meta is going far out of its way to automate maintenance work.

Approached for comment by Ars, a Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the testing of robots for data center work.

More on data centers: Data Center Backlash Has Officially Rattled Sam Altman

The post As If There Was Any Question About Data Centers Being Weak Job Creators, Meta Is Now Deploying Robots to Maintain Them appeared first on Futurism.