Robots set sprint records in Beijing — then burst into flames
The second World Humanoid Robot Games closed out its Beijing run with viral sprints, sparks, and an uncomfortable reality check about what humanoids can actually do. Meanwhile, X reached for lawyers instead of firewalls to kill the internet's favorite ad-free reading front-end.
Humanoid robots beat human world records in the 100-meter sprint and standing high jump in Beijing this week — and then couldn't stop, slow down, or survive the aftermath. At the second World Humanoid Robot Games (August 22–26), machines went from trailing human record-holders last year to beating them, but the viral clips tell the fuller story: sprinters plowing into barriers because their software has no concept of decelerating, one robot breaking apart at the waist in a shower of sparks, another bursting into flames mid-race. Dipam Patel, a PhD candidate at Purdue University working with the US Army Research Lab, told Ars Technica the jumps prove real gains in whole-body control — yet these are single-purpose machines engineered for one finish line, many events allowed human teleoperation (with score penalties), and even the autonomous entries leaned on cloud computing over 5G links rather than onboard compute. The new practical events were more damning than any crash: only three of twelve teams completed the timed firefighting-and-rescue challenge, and the laundry-washing, hotel-housekeeping, and library-shelving heats ran well below human working speed. We covered the spectacle side when Honor's Lightning robot beats Bolt's 100m world record — the honest takeaway now is that the boring chores, not the races, are the benchmark that matters. Investors poured more than $6 billion into humanoid companies in 2025 alone, and reliability across ten runs — not one glorious heat — will decide whether that money was well placed.
X sent cease-and-desist letters to Nitter, the open-source project behind ad-free X readers, demanding its instances and code repository be taken down permanently. The letters went out August 24, citing the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act and the Lanham Act while claiming evidence of API circumvention and scraped account data; nitter.net went dark within hours and its maintainer, the developer known as Zedeus, says development has stopped while he seeks legal advice. Unlike the 2024 crackdown, when API restrictions killed the flagship instance only for the network to return by wiring instances to real accounts, X is now pursuing the project through legal threats with a shutdown deadline of late afternoon Eastern time today. For anyone following AI, the stakes reach beyond one front-end: tools like Nitter are how researchers and agents pull public posts without logging in, and every such door closing narrows the openly readable web that models and agents depend on.
What to watch: X's August 25 deadline has now passed — watch whether the remaining Nitter instances comply quietly and whether X escalates to forcing a GitHub repository takedown.
Should platforms sell affordable read-only access to public posts instead of litigating every scraper? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: Ars Technica · AP News · Global Times · South China Morning Post · TechCrunch · Nitter · Ars Technica
