Chinese humanoid robots broke human records on the opening day of the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Saturday, with one machine finishing the 100-meter sprint in 9.39 seconds and another clearing 2.88 meters in the standing high jump. The sprint time beat Usain Bolt's 9.58-second mark set in 2009, while the jump went past Javier Sotomayor's 2.45 meters from 1993.
The numbers mattered because they came at the start of a five-day event that has more than 2,000 humanoid robots entered across 51 events and more than 1,000 competitions. The games are in their second year, and the opening round was designed to show how far the machines have come in a format that still asks them to do the same basic athletic tasks humans have long used to test speed and balance.
For Li Yanfeng, the pull of the event was personal as much as technological. She said she had been uneasy about artificial intelligence before deciding to come and see the progress for herself. “At first, I wasn't very accepting of artificial intelligence. I was even a bit resistant to it, because of the possibility that it might replace or displace humans,” she said. “But now that I see this development is unstoppable, I decided to come and take a look.”
The records also came with a caveat that keeps the story from reading like a clean handoff from athletes to machines. Experts say humanoid robots are still used mostly for demonstrations, performances and research, even as they start to post numbers that sit inside human record books. Yang Shangzheng, watching the event, said the sight was striking because the tasks were ordinary for people but new for robots. “These sports are perfectly normal for humans, but now robots can do them. I find it amazing,” he said.
Both record-setting machines were from Beijing-based X-Humanoid, a detail that underscored how the event is being used as a showcase for China's push in advanced robotics. One trial before the opening even produced a faster sprint, when a robot from Honor finished 100 meters in 9.32 seconds and reached a peak speed of 14.5 meters per second. But the official result on Saturday was 9.39 seconds, the one that counts in the opening-day ledger.
The setting added another layer. The games are being held in the National Speed Skating Oval built for the 2022 Winter Olympics, and Beijing is also hosting the 2026 World Robot Conference the same week, where around 3,000 products, including humanoid robots, are on display. With 16 countries taking part, among them Germany, Japan and the U.S., the competition has become a measure not only of machine performance but of where China believes it stands in a fast-moving field.
What remains unresolved is how far that performance translates beyond the arena. Liu Tao described the robots on display as “the best robots China currently has to offer,” but the opening day also showed the gap between proof of concept and daily use. The machines can now beat long-established human records in controlled events. The harder question is how quickly they can move from a five-day showcase to work that matters outside it.
