When Edward Warchocki speaks with you, he sounds like a regular guy. “Not super intelligent, but very emotional, very easy to make friends with,” says Bartosz Idzik, the person who created him. But when he doesn’t talk, it’s harder to forget what Warchocki really is: a 4-foot-tall humanoid robot that’s wandering the city streets of Poland.
Six months ago, Idzik and his friend Radosław Grzelaczyk had the idea of buying a humanoid robot from China. They named it “Edward Warchocki” after Grzelaczyk’s dog Eddie and the Polish word for growling, “warczeć,” but also because it sounds like a passable name for a Pole. The first few days they took Edward out, it couldn’t speak, and people were clearly scared of it. Then Idzik, a software developer, wired Edward to a large language model that made it capable of having live conversations in Polish.
“When he started to talk, people loved him. Without talking, it’s just a 40-kilogram machine,” Idzik says.
Edward soon made lots of friends. It visited the Polish parliament and talked to politicians, hiked up mountains and waded in the lake, and was jokingly arrested by the police. In April, a video of it chasing away wild boars in Warsaw, armed with a backpack and a Rolex, went viral worldwide. By now, Edward has over 1 million followers and 4 billion views across social media.
In 2026, you must have seen at least one of these humanoid influencers vibing around the world. There’s “Rizzbot,” which wears a cowboy hat and flirts with passersby on the streets of Austin; “Bart Robot,” which was breakdancing with Knicks fans in New York, celebrating the team’s historic championship; and the “Brickell Clanker,” which changed into different jerseys to party with World Cup fans after each game.
But unless you’ve been paying close attention, you probably haven’t realized these robots are all the same model: Unitree G1, one of the most available and affordable humanoid robots on the global market today, made by a Chinese company that’s leading the robotics industry. The G1 is about the size of a child, with a hollowed-out face with a ring of blue light and light-gray limbs made of aluminum. It’s going on America’s Got Talent, showing off kung fu, having boxing matches, parkouring, dancing at concerts, running with kids, cooking (but failing), streaming with Kai Cenat, begging for money, dating itself, being ordained as a monk in Japan and Korea, and praying at a mosque in Dubai.
An anonymous shitposter on X put it: “This clanker is lit as fuck!”
Unitree will go public on the Chinese stock market in about two weeks. Its financial disclosure tells how popular the company’s products are: Unlike most robot companies whose products are still being tested in labs, more than half of Unitree’s 2025 revenue came from delivering humanoid robots to real customers. It shipped 5,511 humanoids in 2025 at an average price of less than $25,000 each. And 43 percent of all sales came from outside China. The company also became profitable for the first time last year.
“We tested a lot of humanoids, and the G1 was the best for its purpose,” Idzik says. “We are used to China copying other countries, but from the perspective of humanoids, other people should copy China. ”
Despite its commercial success, the company and its robots are often the subject of intense doubts. Sure, they can perform clout-seeking, crowd-pleasing tasks, but can they hold down a traditional job contributing to the economy, like working on an assembly line or cleaning a house? When will Unitree G1 get a real job?
Buying It in the US
Jake Cooperstein, a 24-year-old who lives in Miami, says he was inspired by Edward and other accounts to create a humanoid influencer of his own. In January, he visited the warehouse of a robotics shop in New York and tested the Unitree G1 robot. He was impressed by how easy it was to operate. The next day, he secured an order and paid the deposit.
On Unitree’s website, a basic G1 robot is priced at $13,500, but that’s before any tariff, shipping, and taxes. A US distributor lists the robot at about $19,000 instead. Cooperstein was not satisfied with that, though. The most basic version doesn’t come with more sophisticated parts like dextrous hands and is prohibited from modification. He instead chose the U5 variation that’s designed for educational buyers. It has more parts and better customization but sits at the price of $66,000.
Cooperstein named his G1 robot the “Brickell Clanker,” after the downtown Miami neighborhood, and started taking it out in public to interact with people.
Brickell Clanker got its big break by attending the World Cup games after-parties this summer, changing into different jerseys for Argentina, Brazil, and the US. Today, Cooperstein makes money mostly by charging a fee to bring Brickell Clanker to influencer parties, nightclubs, and corporate events. Rates range from $800 to $1,200 an hour, depending on what the robot needs to do.
Cooperstein recently got another robot: a Unitree R1. At almost one-third the base price of the G1, this faster, lighter model is Unitree’s attempt to make humanoids even more affordable. He named the new robot the “Lil Clanker.”
It’s unclear whether he’ll be able to keep buying Unitree’s robots. In July, the US Federal Communications Commission announced a ban on new Chinese-made humanoid robots. The models that had cleared approvals—like Unitree G1 and R1—are theoretically still allowed, but no one knows for sure. What’s certain is that when Unitree releases its next generation of humanoid robots, it won’t be able to sell them to the US. Unitree didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Hardware and Software Limits
In Europe, Edward Warchocki faces fewer threats. Idzik says MERA Robotics, the company he cofounded with Grzelaczyk, now has a fleet of 20 humanoid robots, most of them Unitree G1. Every robot in Poland shares the personality of Edward, but they also have some in the Middle East and Southeast Asia operating as different influencers.
While the LLM can enable the robots to converse freely, when it comes to physical movement they’re still under a lot of constraints. Both Idzik and the Cooperstein say that when they bring the robots out now, they are teleoperating the robots most of the time. Theoretically, the Unitree G1 should be able to move around in the physical environment by itself, but they are worried of a malfunction possibly hurting a bystander, creating a safety hazard.
The G1 robot that Cooperstein got came with about 20 gestures and 15 dance moves built in. Beyond that, it takes some technical knowledge to program new movements. For example, he taught the Brickell Clanker to move its arms in a way that simulates the signature “Viking Row” gesture done by Norwegian soccer fans this year.
Cooperstein still remembers the first day he took Brickell Clanker to the World Cup fan festival. Hundreds of people, including the press, circled the humanoid and cheered it on as it danced. “Nobody knows that it's me controlling it. It seems like I'm blending in with the crowd. I'm just staring out and looking at everybody,” he says, “and I'm like, ‘holy shit, this is the future.’”
This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
