Tiangong Ultra beats Bolt’s 100-meter record at Beijing robot games

Tiangong Ultra beats Bolt’s 100-meter record at Beijing robot games

2 min read•Aug 24, 2026•
Ben Harris
Ben Harris

Tiangong Ultra beat Usain Bolt’s 100-meter record at the World Humanoid Robot Games, finishing in 9.39 seconds, in a result first reported by The Verge. The result puts a robot ahead of Bolt’s 9.58-second mark while the event is designed to showcase bipedal robot technology across competitions involving robots from 16 countries.

Tiangong Ultra was made by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center and ran the distance in a preliminary heat on Saturday. Honor-developed Lightning followed at 9.47 seconds.

Tiangong Ultra also ran the 400-meter race in 38.16 seconds, beating the 43.03-second world record set by Wayde van Niekerk in 2016.

The games launched in 2025 and are designed to showcase advancements in bipedal bot technology. This year’s event has 2,056 robots from 16 countries, with categories for sprinting, jumping, football, boxing, and more.

The times provide the clean headline; the finishes are less tidy. Watching the models run can be amusing and a little unsettling because of the bizarre way they move to dash so quickly.

Unlike human athletes, these sprinting bots do not typically get a victory lap. Several videos show them colliding with cushioned walls at impressive speeds, after which the robots or pieces of what remains are collected and carried away on a stretcher.

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.”

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