Cases › physical harm › LR-2026-0726
Humanoid robot malfunctions and kicks near engineer during test in China
Preliminary Why: Publisher not yet named · subject to change
Developing: a major or severe case captured in the last 72 hours. Later changes are logged on the corrections page.
Status: no action reported
No source states: loss or records, developer and model, agent tool, could do, deployer.
Severity severe: Safety of life test: the robot narrowly missed an engineer with a spinning kick.
A humanoid robot was undergoing a test at Unitree Robotics in Shaoxing, China, when it malfunctioned, performing uncontrolled movements. It kicked a remote control out of an engineer's hand and narrowly missed him with a spinning kick. The incident was captured on security video. The monitor classed the event as an AI incident, reasoning that the malfunction during testing led to physical aggression towards a human. The incident is reported as highlighting safety risks associated with AI-driven robotics.
What happened
What was done
No source states an action or fix.
Risks
Primary43 incidents
Sorted by rule from the case's fields; not yet read from the sources.
Controls
Not yet read for controls. Controls that mitigate the primary risk:
Harness ApplicationPhysical safety interlocks · Human approval for high-impact actions · Live behaviour monitoring · Adversarial testing before deployment
Evidence
No source states: what the AI was doing, what went wrong, what it reached or did, when it happened, when it was found, how many records were exposed, the direct loss, a count of the other parties affected, any court case, the cause, what set it off, what was done.
Show the full account: 1 items from the primary sources
What happened, in order
Not dated in the sources:
- The incident was captured on security video.
Show every field, with its source and grade
What happened
Impact
Context
LR-2026-0726 · version 1 · published 2026-11-01 after automatic checks; not yet checked field by field by a person · JSON