Context

Ken Goldberg, the UC Berkeley roboticist, calls these events robot theater: “Many of them have humans controlling them... Beware of what you see in the videos, it isn’t quite real.”

He is largely right, and this site is built on the assumption that he is. Almost every bout in the record was remote-piloted by a named or unnamed human. Iron Fist King’s robots moved on motion capture taken from professional kickboxers. The 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games took the criticism seriously enough to write it into the rules, halving the score of any teleoperated machine.

The honest framing is that this is a piloted sport that is slowly becoming an autonomous one, and that the difference is the single most important fact about any given event. Where a league’s autonomy level is disputed — URKL’s is — we say so on the open questions page rather than picking the more exciting answer.

The FCC added foreign-produced advanced robotic devices to the Covered List. This is widely reported as a ban on Chinese humanoids in the United States. It is not.

Existing equipment authorizations are not revoked. The Unitree G1, Go2, H2, A2 and R1 were certified before that date, and used units and continued operation are unaffected. The exposure is future models seeking new authorization.

One machine on this site is in a different position: EngineAI’s T800 reportedly had no FCC equipment authorization on record as of August 2026 — which matters if you are thinking about competing with one on American soil.

The Pentagon added Unitree to its list of Chinese Military Companies. This is also not a purchase ban.

A 1260H listing binds the Department of War: it constrains what the Department itself may procure. Private and commercial buyers are unaffected, which is why American leagues continue to run on Unitree hardware and why Unitree became UFB’s official robotics partner five months before the listing and remained so after it.

Six robotics companies signed an open letter, “General Purpose Robots Should Not Be Weaponized”: Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, ANYbotics, Clearpath Robotics, Open Robotics — and Unitree.

It is regularly cited as though it were in tension with robot fighting. It is not. The pledge covers attaching weapons to general-purpose robots. Sport combat between two unarmed machines is outside it, and no signatory has suggested otherwise.

Unitree announced what it describes as the first fully autonomous high-dynamic humanoid combat — no teleoperation and no choreography. Its predecessor, UnifoLM-WMA-0, was open-sourced in September 2025.

This is the manufacturer’s own claim and it has not been independently verified. If it holds up it is the most important thing that has happened in this sport; if it does not, it is exactly the kind of video Goldberg is warning about. Both possibilities are live, and until someone outside Unitree confirms it, the record says so.