The apparent attack of a humanoid robot at a festival in northeast China this month is likely to pump up talk again of a dystopian narrative where bots rise up against their human masters.
In something out of a science fiction B-movie, a robot dressed in a bright jacket lurched toward a group of shocked onlookers standing behind a barricade. The robot’s handler quickly dragged it away, captured in this startling video.
Organizers of the Spring Festival Gala in Tianjin said the robot suffered a “simple failure” after it passed a battery of safety tests before the event. Additional measures, they insisted, will be taken to avoid a repeat.
The incident isn’t the first time a robot has turned against humankind, nor will it be the last. But it is surely the latest example of artificial intelligence (AI) and robots threatening humans.
Wayward AI bots and physical robots have occasionally insulted people, told them to die, and even bloodied them.
Some have even been programmed to spew hate. When researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, trained one of OpenAI’s most advanced large language models (LLMs) on bad code, it called for human enslavement by AI, praised Nazis, and urged its users to overdose. The researchers aren’t sure what happened in an incident they refer to as “emergent misalignment.”
There is no debate that incidents are rising.
Last year, a Michigan college student was confronted by Google’s AI chatbot Gemini when discussing aging adults. “This is for you, human,” Gemini said in the midst of the conversation. “You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please.”
Several years ago, a robot at Tesla Inc.’s factory in Austin, Texas, attacked an engineer as he performed maintenance on two disabled robots nearby. The victim was pinned by the machine – designed to grab and move freshly cast aluminum car parts – and injured when it sunk its metal claws into his back and arms, leaving a “trail of blood” on the factory floor, according to reports.
Another bizarre video caught a tiny robot named Erbai leading larger machines to walk off the job. The footage came from the CCTV circuit of a showroom in Shanghai, where the company involved claimed the bots were “kidnapped” by Erbai.
Rise of robots is not some ethereal concept consigned to a mid-20th Century sci-fi potboiler. Advances in generative AI and robotics the past few years have made a mixed human-bot world an inevitable slice of everyday life in the office, at home, while socializing, and on the road.
Reports, studies and anecdotes abound about the inevitable joining of humans and robots to work together. Some already are referring to “digital labor” and billion-bot workforces. The year of generative artificial intelligence (2024) morphed into agentic AI (2025), and like something out of “I, Robot,” it is slowly happening everywhere we turn.
