Tiangong Ultra runs 100m in 9.39s at World Humanoid Robot Games, under Bolt's record

Robots run faster than the fastest human

Two humanoid robots have covered 100 meters faster than any human on record. According to The Verge, Tiangong Ultra, a machine built by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, completed the distance in 9.39 seconds during a preliminary heat on Saturday at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. That is quicker than the 9.58 seconds Usain Bolt ran in 2009, the human world mark that has stood ever since. Close behind was Lightning, a robot developed by Honor, which finished in 9.47 seconds.

The 400-meter mark fell too

Tiangong Ultra did not stop at the short sprint. The Verge reports that the same robot ran a 400-meter race in 38.16 seconds, which is ahead of the 43.03-second world record set by Wayde van Niekerk in 2016.

A growing competition for bipedal machines

The World Humanoid Robot Games is an annual, Olympics-style event created to demonstrate progress in bipedal robotics. It launched in 2025, and this year's edition in Beijing has drawn 2,056 robots from 16 countries, competing across disciplines that include sprinting, jumping, football and boxing, according to The Verge.

Fast legs, poor brakes

The racing has an unusual ending. As The Verge describes it, the sprinting robots generally do not get a victory lap: video from the event shows them plowing into padded walls at high speed past the finish line, after which the machines, or the parts remaining of them, are collected and carried off on stretchers. The site also notes that watching these robots run looks strange, describing their high-speed gait as both amusing and a little unsettling.

Why it matters

Bipedal running at competitive speed is among the harder control problems in robotics, requiring a machine to balance, push off and absorb impact on alternating steps. Clearing the times of Bolt and van Niekerk, even in a preliminary heat and on the event's own terms, indicates that humanoid platforms can now generate and manage the forces needed for genuine sprinting rather than just walking or shuffling.

The comparison to human athletics records works as a benchmark rather than an official athletics achievement, and the benchmark moved a lot in a short time: the competition itself only launched in 2025, and machines at this year's edition are already posting times faster than the best any human has run.

The crash landings, meanwhile, point at what remains unsolved. Coming safely to a stop from a full sprint appears harder for these platforms than getting up to speed, and durability under athletic loads is clearly still a work in progress. For real-world deployment, robots that can start, stop and survive their own performance will matter as much as raw pace.