AgiBot Passes Unitree as the World's Top Humanoid-Robot Maker

The race to build humanoid robots has a new leader, and it is not the company most Western readers know. AgiBot, a Shanghai startup founded in 2023, shipped roughly 8,400 humanoid robots in the first half of 2026 and took about 44 percent of the global market, according to figures from Smart Analytics Global reported by the South China Morning Post. That pushed Hangzhou's Unitree, long the sector's poster child, into second place at about 5,900 units and 31 percent.

The jump is steep. AgiBot's shipments rose 562 percent from a year earlier, helped by a lineup that runs from full-size bipedal A-series machines to compact X-series units and wheeled G-series models. Global humanoid shipments as a whole climbed 272 percent, to about 19,100 units. Two Chinese firms now account for roughly three-quarters of them.

Both companies are heading for public markets. Unitree is preparing a closely watched listing on Shanghai's Star Market, an offering we covered last week, while AgiBot has begun exploring a Hong Kong listing. The rivalry has become a proxy for China's broader bet that it can manufacture robots at scale before anyone else.

Sales lead, deployment lag

A word of caution sits underneath the numbers. Writing in Forbes, John Koetsier argued that unit sales are the wrong scoreboard this early. Most of these machines go to research labs, universities and demonstration projects rather than to paying industrial work, and a robot that ships is not the same as a robot that earns its keep on a factory floor.

That distinction matters for the fears that trail this technology. Rapid sales growth invites the assumption that machines are about to walk into every warehouse and job site, a claim we examined recently and found well ahead of the evidence. What the first half of 2026 shows is a manufacturing sprint, not a deployment one. The hardware is arriving. The reliable, paid-for work is still catching up, which is partly why efforts like Google DeepMind's whole-body control model matter as much as the bodies themselves.

For now, the headline is simple enough. A three-year-old company most people have never heard of is shipping more humanoid robots than anyone on earth, and the full-year total could approach 60,000 units.