When people worry about robots causing problems, the conversation usually turns to AI in warfare, autonomous weapons, or machines making decisions that humans shouldn’t delegate. Fair concerns, all of them. But apparently, we’ve been so busy staring at the horizon that we missed the more immediate threat standing right next to the hot pot, a dancing robot that got a little too into the music and started smashing plates at a restaurant in California.
What Actually Happened
A humanoid robot at Haidilao, a Chinese hot pot chain located in Cupertino, California, was performing for diners when things went sideways. The robot, which appears to be an AgiBot X2, a model that was showcased at CES in January, started flailing its arms, got too close to a table and sent plates, chopsticks and dishware flying across the restaurant. The whole thing was captured on video and posted to Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media platform, by a user named Meooow.
Three Staff Members, One Very Enthusiastic Robot
From the footage, at least three Haidilao employees can be seen physically trying to restrain the robot mid-performance. One staff member appears to be frantically scrolling through her phone, possibly looking for a kill switch or a control app. Whether the AgiBot X2 actually has an emergency stop function is unclear, but if it does, nobody in the room seemed to know how to use it quickly enough.
What Haidilao Said
The restaurant chain confirmed the incident to NBC News but pushed back on the idea that the robot was malfunctioning. “In this case, the robot was brought closer to a dining table at a guest’s request, which is not its typical operating setting,” Haidilao told NBC News. “The limited space affected its movement during the performance.”
Haidilao has previously experimented with a fully automated smart restaurant in Beijing, using robotic servers and automated broth mixers. This Cupertino location appears to have been using the humanoid robot purely for entertainment, which, in hindsight, might need a rethink. Several startups are actively working on bringing robots into food service more broadly. Pudu Robotics’ BellaBot, a cat-like robot that guides customers and delivers food, is one example and notably, it has no arms whatsoever. Suddenly, that design choice seems very deliberate.
