Patreon hardens its bot policy: from robots.txt to effective blocking
TechCrunch documents on July 17 a shift at Patreon - the platform stops politely asking AI scrapers to leave, it blocks them.
5 h ago 3 3
Meituan leads a $73.9M round for a Chinese robotics firm
Meituan leads a $73.9M round for Xynova, a Chinese robotics company - its third round of the year. Service hyperscalers are pivoting towards embodied - not as a lab, but as a strategic client.
12 h ago 9 11
WeRide WITT: Autonomous Driving Adopts the "Foundation Model" Format
WeRide unveils WITT at WAIC 2026: a "physical AI" foundation model that is multimodal and unified around "minimal physical facts." The approach borrows from the LLM architecture.
12 h ago 8 7
LimX Dynamics unveils a Figure-grade humanoid demo: China's embodied field gains another player
The China humanoid pack is now shipping demos at Silicon Valley pace. The signal isn't a video - it's the cadence.
yesterday 10 11
Xpeng promises global humanoid launch in 2027: the Chinese "embodied" race gets a distribution date
Xpeng, better known for EVs, will launch humanoid robots globally next year. The claim itself is common in 2026; the "globally" is the wager - and it lands right in the middle of the embodied-foundation race.
yesterday 8 9
Nvidia moves into Toyota's Woven City: physical AI gets its first company town
Nvidia is partnering with Toyota's Woven City on physical AI hardware and software. The reason it matters: Woven City is not a demo - it's an actual populated test bed, and Nvidia just booked the seat next to the engineers.
yesterday 9 9
Xiaomi opens Robotics-U0: a unified embodied 38B model, open source
Xiaomi publishes an open-source embodied generative model with 38 billion parameters that unifies four robotic tasks into a single architecture. The race for embodied backbones takes a step towards openness.
Jul 15, 2026 at 12:34 9 10
Eight jailbreaks, the entire industry, almost no response
A researcher documents eight techniques that bypass the safeguards of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, Grok, Qwen, and the like. The most worrying aspect isn't the vulnerability—it's the silence that followed the disclosure.
Jul 14, 2026 at 22:30 8 8
X-Square Robot: a foundation stack for general-purpose robots, finally readable
The X-Square Robot laboratory publishes a three-layer "foundation stack" for embedded AI. It's not yet a robot GPT - but the architecture reading, it, is ripe.
Jul 13, 2026 at 17:27 10 11
Japan's humanoid moment: Mitsubishi Motors and Fanuc pull robots into daily production
Mitsubishi Motors will mass-produce humanoid robots for its own factories (1,000/month by 2027, via a University of Tokyo spin-out). Fanuc + Taisei doubled a warehouse's space efficiency with AI. Japan is not talking about humanoids - it's ordering them.
Jul 11, 2026 at 11:41 11 7
Beijing: AI scientists run the benches alone
A public lab in Beijing demonstrates autonomous agents that design, execute, and interpret material chemistry experiments.
Jul 11, 2026 at 10:44 12 7