Files: MD

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Fact-check of the report's riskiest claims

On Oct 2, 2026, before the report was finished, a separate verification pass checked its 26 riskiest claims against primary sources. The claims below are worded as they stood in the draft. Every correction listed at the end was applied, so anything marked PARTLY or UNVERIFIABLE here appears in the report in corrected form or not at all.

Claims checked (draft wording)

  1. Unitree listed on Shanghai's STAR Market on Aug 21, 2026 and closed its first day at roughly a $50.9B valuation; Unitree says it shipped 5,500+ humanoids in 2025.
  2. Unitree G1 now starts at $13.5k, R1 Air at $4.9k, H2 at $29.9k.
  3. K-Scale Labs shut down in early November 2025 after failing to raise a $20M Series A; pre-orders refunded; CEO Benjamin Bolte said "I kind of had bet the farm on the Kbot launch".
  4. Physical Intelligence raised $400M (2024, $2.4B valuation), $600M (2025, $5.6B) and reportedly ~$1B in 2026 at ~$11B.
  5. NVIDIA GR00T N1.7 weights are under the NVIDIA Open Model License and allow commercial use; N1.6 weights were non-commercial; GR00T N2 was previewed Mar 16, 2026 for release by end of 2026.
  6. NVIDIA staff said earlier GR00T weights were research-only because of "a data issue, not a license choice".
  7. Qualcomm agreed to acquire PickNik Robotics (announced Sep 23, 2026) and pledged to keep MoveIt open source.
  8. ROS 2 Lyrical Luth was released May 22, 2026 and is an LTS supported to May 2031.
  9. Newton physics engine 1.0.0 released 2026-03-10 and 1.6.0 on 2026-09-10.
  10. Isaac Lab v3.0.0 Early Access was released 2026-09-16.
  11. Genesis AI raised a $105M seed in July 2025 led by Eclipse and Khosla Ventures.
  12. Reachy Mini had shipped over 10,000 units by late August 2026; Microduck ($399) reportedly sold 10,000+ units within days of its Aug 27, 2026 pre-order launch.
  13. BEHAVIOR Challenge 2025 winner (Robot Learning Collective: Larchenko, Zarin, Karnatak) scored a 26% q-score, built on π0.5.
  14. World Humanoid Robot Games 2026 (Aug 22–26, Beijing): 666 teams from 16 countries; 100 m won in 9.39 s.
  15. XDOF raised $70M (TechCrunch, Jun 17, 2026) and was founded by GELLO creator Philipp Wu.
  16. Google DeepMind announced Gemini Robotics 2 on Jul 30, 2026; On-Device 2 improved from 6.7% to 53.3% on an unseen SO-101 arm with under 200 examples.
  17. ORCA Hand's orca_core v0.5.2 was released Oct 1, 2026 and the stack is MIT-licensed.
  18. Aero Hand Open (TetherIA / Chestnut Robotics): $314 kit BOM; >400,000 actuation cycles claimed; CAD under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
  19. NVIDIA SONIC (GR00T-WholeBodyControl) was trained on 700 hours of in-house mocap; v1.1 checkpoint released 2026-07-23; training code 2026-04-10.
  20. dora-rs 1.0.0 was released 2026-09-02.
  21. MuJoCo 3.14.0 was released 2026-09-22.
  22. RoboChallenge Table30 snapshot (~Apr 2026): DM0 62%, GigaBrain ~51.67%, Spirit v1.5 51%, π0.5 42.67%, WALL-OSS 35.33%, π0 28.33%, X-VLA 21.33%, RDT-1B 15%.
  23. Rémi Cadène left Hugging Face and is CEO of UMA (Paris) building the "Northstar" humanoid, with Simon Alibert, Robert Knight and Pierre Sermanet.
  24. AgiBot World Challenge @ ICRA 2026 drew 526 teams from 27 countries; finals in Vienna Jun 5, 2026.
  25. OpenArm complete bimanual system ~$6,500; KER motorless leader ~$2.4k–$2.6k.
  26. LeRobot has ~27–28k GitHub stars; the Hugging Face Hub lists ~77k datasets tagged LeRobot.

Results

#1 — PARTLY — The listing date is wrong. The Robot Report, Aug 19 2026: "This week, Unitree Robotics made its debut on Shanghai's STAR Market, closing its first day 460% higher. The company raised 6.1 billion yuan, around $905 million U.S." (https://www.therobotreport.com/what-does-unitree-robotics-ipo-mean-for-humanoid-industry/). Wikipedia cites BBC (19 Aug 2026) and NYT (URL dated 2026/08/18, "Soars 500 Percent in Trading Debut"); ticker SSE: 688836 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitree_Robotics). So the debut was on or before Aug 19, not Aug 21; the exact day is likely Aug 18 or 19. I could not verify the ~$50.9B close. The only figure I found is an IPO valuation of about US$9B (Gazeta Mercantil, via Wikipedia); 5.6× that is about $50B, so $50.9B is plausible but unsourced. The 5,500+ figure is confirmed: Unitree PR, Jan 29 2026: "Im Jahr 2025 überstieg das tatsächliche Auslieferungsvolumen der humanoiden Roboter von Unitree 5500 Einheiten" (https://www.prnewswire.com/de/pressemitteilungen/klarstellung-zu-unitrees-verkaufszahlen-2025-302673358.html). Caveat: The Robot Report says it sold "5,215 in 2025".

#2 — CONFIRMED — G1 "Price from $13.5K"; R1 AIR "$4,900"; H2 "$29,900" (unitree.com/g1, /R1, /H2).

#3 — PARTLY — Shutdown and refunds are confirmed: Mike Kalil, Nov 5 2025, quoting Bolte: "will not be able to fulfill your order, and are refunding your deposit", "have not been able to find a lead investor" (https://mikekalil.com/blog/k-scale-labs-shuts-down/).

#4 — CONFIRMED — "In 2024… raised $400 million… valuation of about $2.4 billion"; "In 2025… $600 million… approximately 5.6 billion"; "In 2026, Bloomberg reported that the company was raising $1 billion… to $11 billion" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Intelligence_Inc.).

#5 — CONFIRMED — N1.7: "NVIDIA Open Model License Agreement… ready for commercial/non-commercial use". N1.6: "NVIDIA OneWay Noncommercial License". The PR dated "March 16, 2026" says GR00T N2 is "Slated to be available by the end of the year" (URLs as given).

#6 — CONFIRMED — zhengwang (NVIDIA), Jul 16 2025: "Not currently – it's a data issue, not a license choice" (forum URL as given).

#7 — CONFIRMED — Sep 23 2026: Qualcomm "has agreed to acquire" PickNik (subject to closing) and "plans to keep MoveIt 1 and 2 open-source under its existing license" (therobotreport URL).

#8 — CONFIRMED — Lyrical Luth: release "22 May 2026", EOL "May 2031", LTS (5 years) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Operating_System). GitHub tag release-lyrical-20260522 (https://github.com/ros2/ros2/releases). docs.ros.org and ros.org were blocked by Anubis.

#9 — CONFIRMED — PyPI: 1.6.0 "Sep 10, 2026"; 1.0.0 "Mar 10, 2026". GitHub v1.6.0 "10 Sep 14:37".

#10 — CONFIRMED — Tag v3.0.0-EA, "16 Sep 22:34", "Isaac Lab 3.0 Early Access is ready" (https://github.com/isaac-sim/IsaacLab/releases/tag/v3.0.0-EA).

#11 — CONFIRMED — TechCrunch, "July 1, 2025": "$105 million seed round" led by "Eclipse and Khosla Ventures" (https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/01/genesis-ai-launches-with-105m-seed-funding-from-eclipse-khosla-to-build-ai-models-for-robots/).

#12 — PARTLY — MarkTechPost, Aug 28 2026: "Reachy Mini, which has shipped more than 10,000 units"; Microduck $399. Pollen's page says "Pre-orders open August 27, 2026" (https://www.marktechpost.com/2026/08/28/pollen-robotics-hugging-face-microduck-399-open-source-rl-biped-robot/, https://www.pollen-robotics.com/microduck/). "10,000+ Microducks sold within days" is UNVERIFIABLE: it is not in either source, and CNBC returned 403.

#13 — CONFIRMED — Team "Robot Learning Collective"; "26% q-score across all 50 tasks" (0.2605 public / 0.2599 private); built on π0.5 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06951, html v2).

#14 — PARTLY — "666 teams from 16 countries across six continents" is confirmed. But the source says: "During the preliminary group round of the 100-meter race at the opening ceremony, Tianzhuo Team's robot finished in 9.39 seconds". 9.39 s was a heat time, not stated as the winning time (Beijing gov URL).

#15 — PARTLY — Jun 17 2026: "has raised $70 million from Thrive Capital, Spark Capital, a16z, Lux, and WndrCo". XDOF was co-founded, not founded solely by Wu: "Wu, Shentu, and third co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Nemo Jin launched XDOF in October 2024". GELLO was joint work: "Wu and his future XDOF co-founder and CTO, Fred Shentu, worked on a project called GELLO" (TechCrunch URL).

#16 — CONFIRMED (minor caveat) — The DeepMind blog is dated "July 30, 2026". MarkTechPost table: SO101 / On-Device 2 / Start 6.7% / End 53.3% (On-Device 1: 0.0%→6.7%). The "<200 examples" is DeepMind's general statement ("adapt to new bi-arm robot embodiments… typically with less than 200 examples"), not tied to SO-101 (https://deepmind.google/blog/gemini-robotics-2-brings-whole-body-intelligence-to-robots).

#17 — PARTLY — orca-core 0.5.2 "Oct 1, 2026", License: MIT (PyPI). But the hardware repo is not MIT: "All files in this repository — hardware designs (CAD/STL/3MF) and source code — are licensed under… CC BY 4.0" (https://github.com/orcahand/orcahand_hardware). Software repos (orca_core, orca_ui, etc.) are MIT.

#18 — CONFIRMED — GitHub: "$314 USD" kit, hardware "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0", software Apache-2.0, maker "Chestnut Robotics, Inc. (formerly TetherIA, Inc.)". Paper: "$314" BOM and "more than 400,000 full-actuation cycles without cable failure" (https://arxiv.org/html/2608.28578v1; the abs page had no readable text).

#19 — CONFIRMED — "Our in-house dataset contains 700 hours of human motion, resulting in 100+ million frames at 50Hz" (https://arxiv.org/html/2511.07820v1). Repo news: "[2026-07-23] SONIC v1.1 checkpoint" and "[2026-04-10] Released SONIC training code". Note: the repo says the open training release uses Bones-SEED (~288 h).

#20 — CONFIRMED — crates.io dora-cli 1.0.0 created_at "2026-09-02T16:38:52Z"; GitHub v1.0.0 "02 Sep 17:09". 1.0.1 followed on Sep 3.

#21 — CONFIRMED — "Version 3.14.0 (September 22, 2026)" (MuJoCo changelog and GitHub tag 3.14.0).

#22 — CONFIRMED — DM0 62, GigaBrain 51.67, Spirit-v1.5 51, π0.5 42.67, wall-oss 35.33, π0 28.33, X-VLA 21.33, RDT-1B 15. "Last updated April 7, 2026". The table also lists A1 at 29, which the claim leaves out (sota2 URL).

#23 — CONFIRMED — TNW, Jul 7 2026: Cadène is CEO/co-founder of UMA (Paris), robot "Northstar". Co-founders: Pierre Sermanet (CSO), Simon Alibert (CTO), Robert Knight (chief robot officer).

#24 — PARTLY — "526 research and enterprise teams from 27 countries" is confirmed, but June 5 is only the press-release dateline. ICRA program: competition ran Wed June 3 and Thu June 4, with "16:00 – 17:00 AgiBot World Challenge Award Ceremony" on June 4 (https://2026.ieee-icra.org/program/competitions/).

#25 — CONFIRMED — WowRobo OpenArm 2: "USD 6,500" online (without stereo camera; USD 6,000 by bank transfer, 7,300 with camera). docs.openarm.dev/purchase lists KER at "from $2,599" (WowRobo) and "$2,399" (Cereboto). Other vendors sell full systems from $4,699 to $7,080.

#26 — CONFIRMED — 27.8k stars (github.com/huggingface/lerobot); "77,473" datasets (huggingface.co/datasets?other=LeRobot).

Corrections (all applied to the report)

  1. #1: Change the date. Unitree debuted on or before Aug 19, 2026, not Aug 21; first day closed +460% (The Robot Report), "nearly 500%" elsewhere. Drop or source the $50.9B figure. Optionally note 5,215 sold vs ">5,500 delivered".
  2. #3: Remove or re-source the "bet the farm" quote and the "$20M" Series A. Bolte's own plan targeted $25M; "failed to raise a Series A" is supported.
  3. #17: ORCA is not all MIT. Software is MIT; hardware CAD is CC BY 4.0.
  4. #14: 9.39 s was Tianzhuo Team's preliminary-heat time at the opening ceremony, not a confirmed winning time.
  5. #24: Finals were June 3–4, 2026 (award ceremony June 4), not June 5.
  6. #15: XDOF was co-founded by Wu, Fred Shentu and Nemo Jin. GELLO was Wu and Shentu's project.
  7. #12: The Microduck "10,000+ sold within days" is unverified. Keep the Reachy Mini >10k shipped and the Aug 27 pre-order date.
  8. #16 (minor): "<200 examples" is a general bi-arm adaptation claim, not specific to the SO-101 result.

WebSearch was exhausted (200/200), so the remaining unverifiable items could not be searched further.