Tesla and Figure AI appear to be in an escalating sprint as they boast the advanced locomotion of their flagship humanoid robots.
Tesla went first, sharing a 5-second clip of its Optimus humanoid robot running in what looks like the EV maker’s Fremont plant. The official Tesla Optimus X account said it “set a new PR in the lab,” but didn’t indicate how fast that personal record was.
Tesla also brought a golden Optimus 2.5 variant to NeurIPS 2025 (Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems) in San Diego. The manufacturer highlighted the next-generation iteration’s highly dexterous five-fingered end effector, which has a reported 27 degrees of freedom (DoF).
Silicon Valley-based Figure AI then shared a longer 8-second clip of its third-generation humanoid, the Figure 03, doing short shuttle runs, pivoting, and running back with a noticeably improved gait. Observers noted its brief flight phase, where both feet leave the ground. Like Tesla, Figure didn’t specify the robot’s running speed. Neither has indicated the maximum speed of their humanoids.
Optimus and Figure 03 are trained using massive amounts of real-world data and reinforcement learning. Tesla uses an end-to-end AI system similar to the one that powers its FSD; the robot learns from videos of human motions, figures out patterns in balance and timing, and practices in simulation through trial and error. Figure uses a proprietary vision-language-action (VLA) model, called Helix, that combines tactile data, object interactions, and human demonstrations.
Both Tesla and Figure are preparing to aggressively scale production of their humanoids in 2026. Tesla initially planned to manufacture up to 10,000 Optimus robots in 2025 but that has been pushed into 2026 due to design challenges. Elon Musk has said the Gen 3 Tesla Bot will be revealed in the first quarter of 2026 and will be the most humanlike iteration yet. Figure founder Brett Adcock has said he’s confident his $39 billion startup can scale to 100,000 units by 2029.
Also this week, Shenzhen startup EngineAI shared footage of its new full-sized humanoid, the T800, running outside. The Shenzhen startup reports that the Terminator-inspired robot’s top speed is 10 km/h (6.7 mph).