Who's Holding the Controller?

The robots are coming home. At least, that's what the videos say. The makers' most-watched videos have millions of views. Unitree's newest robot, the H2-X, launched on X this month: over fourteen million impressions.

A label is what the video or its page says, not what the robot did. The five unlabelled videos are Unitree's H2-X launch, three of Boston Dynamics' Atlas films and UBTECH's Walker S2.

The makers do label when they want to. Unitree labelled a post of 7 September "Fully Autonomous"; it just didn't label the H2-X launch. 1X's own post of its NEO launch video has 69,293,417 impressions, and no label in its text.

When the Wall Street Journal tested a home robot, 1X's NEO, a voice explained who was really in charge: "I am a remote operator in a different room in the building."

The Journal's own narration names him: an operator "with a VR headset and controllers was the one actually operating Neo". Watch: The Wall Street Journal (its own channel), 'I Tried the First Humanoid Home Robot. It Got Weird.', 28 October 2025, at 3:49 (3:49 to 4:00).

Marques Brownlee reacted to the Journal's test of the same robot: "Yeah, all of this is teleoperated." He didn't test NEO himself.

But, he said, the company did label the two scenes where it wasn't: getting the door, and putting away the dishes. In his words, "they actually are very careful to label exactly when the robot is doing something autonomously". Watch: Marques Brownlee, MKBHD (his own channel), 29 October 2025, 4:15 to 5:20 (4:15 to 5:20).

1X doesn't hide the person. Its own page: "NEO works autonomously by default. For any chore it doesn't know, you can schedule a 1X Expert to guide it, helping NEO learn while getting the job done." The Expert can "remotely supervise its actions at scheduled times".

Its co-founder Bernt Børnich answered Brownlee on X the same day: "all actions portrayed as AI in the video (text layovers from the AI planner) is 100% autonomous." He added: "We hope to ship a mostly fully autonomous robot in 2026".

Why the person behind it? Because that's how the robot learns. The Journal again: "The videos of the robot doing things via tele-operation become the training data to make the AI model smarter."

Watch: The Wall Street Journal (its own channel), at 4:39 (4:39 to 4:50). The Verge heard the same from another maker: Zeroth's CEO said tele-operation in the home will be necessary for safety. Watch: The Verge (its own channel), 'Are humanoid robots the next smart home gadget?', 10 January 2026, 3:23 to 3:56 (3:23 to 3:56).

Figure does claim autonomy, and it says how it measures it. Pretraining its newest model on human video, it says, lifted success in thirty homes it had never seen from 9%, for the same robot trained from scratch, to 56%.

And its own caveat, on the same page: "The point is not that general humanoid robotics is solved."

The rule behind the number is in its words too: "If a human intervention is necessary for safety, that rollout is aborted and failed."

None of this is a trick. But every robot video should answer one question. Who's holding the controller?

Three things to watch. Whether the makers start labelling every film, not just the ones that are autonomous. Whether 1X ships the "mostly fully autonomous robot" it hopes for in 2026. And whether any customer has taken delivery of a NEO; we couldn't confirm that one.

What we couldn't confirm: Whether Unitree's launch film was teleoperated is not stated by the maker and not claimed here. 1X's launch video could not be checked.