Agibot A2 robot walks Met Gala red carpet, then gets stuck in an elevator

China's Agibot A2 Robot Walked the Met Gala Red Carpet. Then It Got Stuck in an Elevator.

China's Agibot A2 humanoid robot walked the Met Gala red carpet on May 5, 2026. It got trapped in an elevator on the way out.

That single detail — confirmed across at least four independent outlets, with staff physically guiding the machine free — tells you everything you need to know about the gap between the humanoid robotics industry's current ambitions and its actual capabilities. Agibot, which calls itself the world's leading humanoid robotics company by volume and revenue, chose a fashion event for its most visible American debut. Not a trade show. Not a factory floor. The Met Gala.

The elevator incident was brief. The robot continued its evening, posing for photographers and serving drinks. But it happened, and the company didn't hide it, which is honest. What the company hasn't fully explained is where roughly 4,800 of its robots actually are.

Agibot announced in March 2026 that it had produced its 10,000th humanoid robot PR Newswire. It shipped 5,168 units in all of 2025, according to figures the company provided to outlets covering CES Gadget Review. The arithmetic is straightforward: if 10,000 cumulative units is accurate and 5,168 represents a full calendar year of shipments, roughly 4,832 robots produced since the company's founding in early 2023 are not yet with customers. The company says it has deployments in Chinese shopping malls, hotels, and exhibitions. It has industrial deployments with manufacturers like Longcheer Technology, where G2 robots run at 99 percent uptime and handle assembly-line tasks The AI Insider. Agibot did not respond to questions about the discrepancy.

The more charitable reading is inventory build-ahead: Agibot is producing robots faster than customers can absorb them, betting that the commercial market will catch up. That is how most serious hardware companies manage growth-stage supply chains — pre-build for demand that hasn't fully materialized yet. It is also how channel stuffing starts. The difference is intent, and intent is hard to see from the outside.

What the data factories reveal about that bet is the more interesting question. Agibot has built facilities where human operators control robots remotely — teleoperation at scale — to generate training data for its GO-1 foundation model. The company sells access to that data by the hour, according to SCMP SCMP. The model, released in March 2025, lets the robots learn new tasks from small datasets. The data factories suggest Agibot is not purely a robot manufacturer — it is also running a synthetic-data-as-a-service business, which changes the unit economics calculation entirely. If the hardware sits in a warehouse, the data it generates while idle still has value. That is either savvy positioning or a narrative propped up by inventory nobody has bought yet.

Agibot is not alone in this tension. Morgan Stanley's head of China industrials research, Zhong Sheng, warned in April that 2026 would be "a critical year as humanoid integrators strive to reach commercialisation and build up their ecosystems," with an "impending shake-out" as the sector matures SCMP. The warning fits a pattern: robotics companies across China and the West are producing robots faster than they can deploy them at scale, and the business model has not fully proven itself. What a shake-out looks like in practice: smaller players run out of capital before finding commercial customers, while well-capitalized survivors absorb engineering talent and customer relationships at distressed prices. Morgan Stanley's Zhong Sheng put Agibot in the well-capitalized camp — for now.

Part of the challenge is that humanoid robots, for all their headline appeal, are genuinely difficult to deploy in unstructured environments. A factory with fixed layouts and known variables is tractable. A hotel lobby during a celebrity event is not. Agibot's A2 navigates well in controlled conditions — it holds a Guinness World Record for walking 106.286 kilometers in November 2025 Wikipedia — but the Met Gala hotel lobby involved photographers, crowds, celebrity handlers, and at least one elevator door that defeated it Interesting Engineering. That's not a humiliation. It's a data point.

The company is moving fast. It was founded in February 2023 by former Huawei engineers Deng Taihua and Peng Zhihui Wikipedia. It has backing from HongShan, Hillhouse Investment, and BYD. It certifies its robots in China, the United States, and the European Union. Its GO-1 foundation model, released in March 2025, is designed to let robots learn new tasks from small datasets. The G2 industrial variant deployed at Longcheer Technology — a consumer electronics manufacturer in China — achieves 310 units per hour throughput with 19-to-20-second cycle times The AI Insider. The Longcheer deployment is the most specific evidence the company has offered for real-world industrial use, and it is one factory.

The Met Gala appearance was, among other things, a statement: the world's leading humanoid robotics company wants to be seen as a cultural participant, not just an industrial tool. In that it succeeded. The robot was photographed, discussed, and featured alongside Alexander Wang on fashion's most publicized red carpet. It also needed two staff members to extract it from an elevator Cybernews Reality Tea.

Both facts are true. Both belong in the story.

— Samantha