What AI do humanoid robots use?

The three routes are business bets, not just engineering ones. Whoever trains in house (Figure, Tesla) bets that data from its own real work is the moat and refuses to share it. Whoever partners (Boston Dynamics with Google DeepMind, announced at CES 2026 with Hyundai as the first industrial customer) bets that no body maker will catch the big AI labs alone. And whoever buys (customers of NVIDIA's GR00T or Physical Intelligence's pi model) bets that the brain will become a standard component, the way Android did for phones. In 2026 no route has won, and that is the match this publication follows.

What exactly that shared architecture is lives in what is a VLA model, and the best-documented case in Figure's Helix, the brain of the Figure 03 that starred in the nearly 40-hour livestream. The other profiles with their brain identified, in our humanoids hub. And the house warning: whatever the route, a brain that learns from data needs watching so it does not degrade.