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California Clears the Road for Autonomous Trucks with New DMV Regulations
California lifted its ban on autonomous heavy trucks. The DMV adopted new regulations enabling testing and commercial deployment of AV trucks, with expanded safety requirements and new emergency responder authorities.
Gemini Takes the Wheel: Google Replaces Assistant in Millions of Cars
Google announced Gemini will replace Google Assistant in Cars with Google Built-in vehicles. The U.S. rollout starts now; GM confirms deployment in approximately 4 million vehicles.
ROBOTERA Closes $280M Round as Thousands of Humanoids Deploy in Logistics
Beijing-based ROBOTERA closed a $280 million strategic round led by SF Group, bringing two-month fundraising to $350 million and valuation past $1.4 billion. Thousands of L7 humanoid robots are already deployed across Chinese logistics centers operated by China Post and SF Group.
Unitree Expands R1 Line with Dual-Arm Platform Starting at $4,290
Unitree Robotics has launched the Dual-Arm Humanoid Robot series, a modular dual-arm platform in fixed and wheeled configurations starting at $4,290. The pricing targets AI researchers and developers building embodied intelligence systems.
1X Technologies Opens Hayward Robot Factory — Target: 100,000 NEOs Per Year
1X Technologies has revealed full details of its NEO Factory in Hayward, California — a 58,000 sq ft facility with current capacity of 10,000 units per year, already sold out. A second site in San Carlos targets 100,000 humanoids annually by end of 2027.
Figure scales to one robot per hour at BotQ: the Figure 03 production breakthrough
Figure has scaled Figure 03 production 24x in 120 days, from one robot per day to one per hour at its BotQ facility. Over 350 units have been produced, and the new System 0 AI model enables zero-shot stair traversal via vision-conditioned whole-body control.
MagicLab Bets $1 Billion on a Robotics Developer Ecosystem
Chinese robotics firm MagicLab took the stage in Silicon Valley to unveil a next-generation humanoid, a foundational world model called Magic-Mix, and a $1 billion developer ecosystem program. The announcements, made at the company's own Global Embodied Intelligence Summit, represent one of the most operationally detailed strategic pivots from a Chinese robotics company in 2026.
World Action Models: What They Are and How They Work
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become the dominant approach to building AI-driven robot control systems over the past several years. Their emerging successor — the World Action Model (WAM) — represents a distinct architectural category that replaces direct image-to-action mapping with video generation as an intermediate planning mechanism. DreamZero, developed by a team at NVIDIA and published in February 2026 as a research paper on arXiv, is the first publicly described system of this class to operate in real time on a real robot. Understanding how it works matters because it points toward a plausible direction for the next generation of robotic foundation models.
ShengShu unveils Motubrain: one AI brain for every robot platform
ShengShu Technology has unveiled Motubrain, a World Action Model that unifies video generation, world modeling, and action control in a single Mixture-of-Transformers architecture. Backed by a $293M Series B from Alibaba Cloud, the model tops RoboTwin 2.0 with 96% success across 50 randomized tasks.
OpenAI Ends Microsoft's Cloud Exclusivity. Models Coming to AWS
OpenAI and Microsoft announced new partnership terms on April 27, 2026 that end Microsoft's exclusive access to OpenAI's API and products. The change resolves a legal conflict between the existing agreement and OpenAI's February deal with Amazon worth up to $50 billion.
Google Signs Pentagon AI Deal, Filling the Gap Anthropic Refused to Fill
Google has granted the U.S. Department of Defense access to its AI models on classified networks, according to reports published April 28, 2026. The move came one day after Anthropic lost its legal standoff with the Pentagon and was formally designated a national security supply-chain risk — the first American company to receive that label. With Google's agreement, the DoD has now secured frontier AI access from three major providers: OpenAI, xAI, and Google.
Google Warns: Malicious Web Pages Are Hijacking AI Agents via Prompt Injection
Google has published a report warning about a new attack vector targeting AI agents. Malicious content hidden inside web pages can seize control of an agent's actions without the user's knowledge. The phenomenon is known as indirect prompt injection.