Agility Robotics' Digit v5 targets work beside humans without safety fencing

2 min read•Aug 11, 2026•

Agility Robotics plans to begin deploying its Digit v5 humanoid robot to early customers in December, first reported by Forbes. The robot is designed to work beside people without traditional safety fencing, a condition Agility says is central to larger deployments because barriers consume floor space and can rule out facilities that lack room.

Daniel Diez, Agility’s chief business officer, says the main barrier to large-scale deployment is not speed, agility, battery capacity or dexterity. Digit v5 will use a new algorithm, cameras and sensors to detect people, understand what it sees and react without dropping a payload or falling over.

Better battery life and quick charging are intended to support 20-hour working days, and customers want one robot to cover a three-shift operation, Diez says. An ISO flange, a standardized connector at the end of the arms, will let Digit use the existing catalog of end effectors; Agility has already demonstrated self-swapping and eventually wants the robot to change tools itself.

The immediate target is bulk material handling in factories and warehouses, where Agility says labor gaps are most acute across the US, Europe, Korea and Japan. Tool changes are also intended to extend Digit into kitting and sorting.

Safety fencing takes floor space, disrupts workflows and has prevented deals at facilities that lack room. Removing it, Diez says, would let people walk by robot areas and integrate machines more fully into factories and warehouses, potentially opening retail and pharmaceutical work.

Speed is not necessarily the benchmark: at Schaeffler’s South Carolina plant, Digit v4 already outpaces an industrial washer’s ability to ingest greasy machine parts. Diez instead frames the test as processing more work than the alternative at below a human’s fully burdened cost, if that person can be found.

Agility is going public through a $2.5 billion merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI under ticker AGLT. The company says it has roughly $300 million in booked revenue across some 1,000 robots and nine customer sites, including Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota and Mercado Libre. The public launch of Digit v5 will show whether the next version can support and grow that figure while humanoids mix with people.

Aug 31, 2026

Meta agrees to teen limits in settlement costing up to $17B

Meta has reached a settlement with attorneys general from 47 states over allegations that it illegally manipulated children’s attention, first reported by Newyorker. The agreement could cost the company up to $17 billion and would change how Facebook and Instagram handle teen access through age verification, daily limits and nighttime restrictions.

Meta did not acknowledge wrongdoing. The Oakland trial turned on whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects providers from liability for user-posted content, should also shield the algorithms that shape what users see; the plaintiffs argued that it should not.

The states presented evidence that senior executives, intent on maximizing the company’s growth, repeatedly set aside concerns about what Meta’s products were doing to its youngest users. A former Meta engineer testified that the chance of a teen encountering violent or graphic content was between a hundred and four hundred times higher than what the company acknowledged publicly.

Meta also spent more than two billion dollars on legal defense in the second quarter of 2026 alone.

Under the agreement, Facebook and Instagram will remove the like count on posts, do more to verify that users are at least thirteen years old, limit service to two hours a day for teenagers and restrict service entirely for those users during nighttime hours.

The settlement was quickly compared with the tobacco lawsuits of the nineties. But Meta is a trillion-dollar company increasingly invested in artificial intelligence, and the agreement applies to only a single facet of its sprawling operations. The deal places a striking financial cost alongside product changes focused on teen users.

New technologies are being disseminated ever more quickly, while the machinery of politics and law delivers accountability intermittently and at a painstaking crawl. It took more than a decade of worrying about how teenagers used Facebook and Instagram for a legal settlement to enforce a change in Meta’s behavior.

Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, stayed away from the lawsuit, arguing that it did not go far enough. After the settlement was announced, he said, “We’ll see them at trial.”