The rise of autonomous, long-running AI agents has introduced a new class of compute demand, namely tasks that maintain large context windows, spawn concurrent...
The rise of autonomous, long-running AI agents has introduced a new class of compute demand, namely tasks that maintain large context windows, spawn concurrent subagents, and iterate continuously without cloud dependency. Security and privacy concerns are also accelerating the shift toward local agents. Developers, by running autonomous agents on hardware they own with NVIDIA NemoClaw…
As we previewed in What’s Next with AWS 2026, we’re announcing the availability of OpenAI GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4 models, and Codex on Amazon Bedrock, giving you access to frontier models and a coding agent for software development.
According to OpenAI, GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.4 models are excellent for coding, reasoning, agentic workflows, and complex professional work. You can use GPT-5.5 for the hardest customer workloads and GPT-5.4 for the best price-performance. You can call them through Responses API on Amazon Bedrock’s next-generation inference engine built for high performance, reliability, and security.
Codex is the OpenAI coding agent for AI-powered software development. According to OpenAI, more than 4 million developers use Codex every week to write, refactor, debug, test, and validate code across large codebases. With GPT-5.5 powering inference, Codex introduces a new class of intelligence optimized for complex, long-horizon developer workflows. You can use the Codex App, the Codex CLI, and IDE integrations with Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, and Xcode, with all model inference routed through the Responses API on Amazon Bedrock.
For customers with data residency requirements, all processing stays within the Bedrock Region you select. You pay per token with no seat licenses and no per-developer commitments.
GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.4 models on Bedrock in action You can access the model programmatically using the OpenAI Responses API to call the bedrock-mantle endpoints through the OpenAI SDK, command-line tools such as curl.
Let’s start with OpenAI SDK for Python. Install OpenAI SDK.
Here is a sample Python code to call GPT-5.5 model on Bedrock:
import os
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
base_url=os.environ["OPENAI_BASE_URL"],
api_key=os.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"],
)
response = client.responses.create(
model=os.environ["BEDROCK_OPENAI_MODEL_ID"],
input=[
{
"role": "developer",
"content": "You are a software engineer with excellent AWS cloud knowledge. Be concise and practical.",
},
{
"role": "user",
"content": "Design a distributed architecture on AWS in Python that should support 100k requests per second across multiple geographic regions.",
},
],
reasoning={"effort": "medium"},
text={"verbosity": "low"},
)
print(response.output_text)
You can call directly the model endpoint using curl.
curl "$OPENAI_BASE_URL/responses" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" \
-d '{
"model": "openai.gpt-5.5",
"input": [
{
"role": "developer",
"content": "You are a software engineer with excellent AWS cloud knowledge."
},
{
"role": "user",
"content": "Design a distributed architecture on AWS in Python that should support 100k requests per second across multiple geographic regions."
}
],
"reasoning": {"effort": "medium"},
"text": {"verbosity": "low"}
}'
You can use the Responses API when you want to use model-managed multi-turn state, need hosted tools, function tools, or richer tool orchestration, and run background or long-running work. To learn more, visit the OpenAI Cookbook Responses examples and getting started guide.
Using OpenAI Codex with GPT-5.5 on Amazon Bedrock You can download Codex CLI, Codex App or Codex VS Code extension and get started with the Bedrock for model inference. Codex supports two Bedrock authentication pathways: Amazon Bedrock API key or AWS SDK credential chain. If you set AWS_BEARER_TOKEN_BEDROCK, Codex uses it first; otherwise Codex falls back to AWS SDK credential chain.
Set AWS_BEARER_TOKEN_BEDROCK in the environment that Codex will read:
Then, configure your preferred Region and set the model ID to openai.gpt-5.5 in ~/.codex/config.toml, which is required for Bedrock API-key authentication. You can also choose openai.gpt-5.4, openai.gpt-oss-120b, or openai.gpt-oss-20b. For the desktop app or VS Code extension, put any environment variables the app needs in ~/.codex/.env.
model = "openai.gpt-5.5"
model_provider = "amazon-bedrock"
[model_providers.amazon-bedrock.aws]
region = "us-east-2"
Restart the desktop app or VS Code extension after changing ~/.codex/config.toml or ~/.codex/.env. In Codex CLI, you should see a /status tab that looks like this:
In Codex App, you can use GPT-5.5 model through Amazon Bedrock inference.
To learn more about how to configure Codex to use OpenAI models on Amazon Bedrock, visit Use Codex with Amazon Bedrock.
Things to know Let me share some important technical details that I think you’ll find useful.
Model latency: OpenAI model information positions GPT-5.5 as fast and GPT-5.4 as medium speed, but customer-perceived latency depends on reasoning effort, output length, tool calls, background mode, Region, quotas, throttling, prompt size, and cache hits. Start GPT-5.5 at medium effort. Start GPT-5.4 with effort set explicitly rather than relying on its none default.
Scaling and capacity: Bedrock’s new inference engine is designed to rapidly provision and serve capacity across many different models. When accepting requests, we prioritize keeping steady state workloads running, and ramp usage and capacity rapidly in response to changes in demand. During periods of high demand, requests are queued, rather than rejected.
Now available OpenAI GPT models and Codex on Amazon Bedrock are available today: GPT-5.5 model in the US East (Ohio) Region, GPT-5.4 model in the US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon) Regions. Check the full list of Regions for future updates. To learn more, visit the OpenAI on Amazon Bedrock page and the Amazon Bedrock pricing page.
Give GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4 models, and Codex on Amazon Bedrock a try today and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon Bedrock or through your usual AWS Support contacts.
OpenAI frontier models and Codex are now generally available on AWS, giving enterprises a new path to build with OpenAI through the AWS environments, controls, and procurement workflows they already use. Customers can get started with OpenAI on AWS and move faster from evaluation to production.
Kalshi’s new American Power Index takes the question every cable segment fights over (who is really winning the contest for power in Washington) and answers it with a single number.
I’ve always been fascinated by solving problems. First, they were math problems in primary school. Then, math, physics, and engineering problems in high school. Then, applying math to decision and control problems in college. Then, applying statistical methods to forecasting problems. Today, I’ve moved on to solving complex company-building problems, but when you break down most complex problems into simpler ones, they often come down to predicting risks and forecasting expected value. Over the years, I’ve learned that the best people, groups of people, algorithms, or systems of algorithms for forecasting the future are full-spectrum signal processors rather than narrow-band signal amplifiers.
Try a small experiment. Ask a dozen random people whether the country is drifting left or right, and you’ll get a dozen confident, incompatible answers, most of them shaped by whichever sources that person already trusts. Media outlets are competing for eyeballs. Polling tells you what people are willing to say out loud. Your feed tells you what your particular corner of the internet wants to be true. None is a reliable guide to what actually comes next. We are buried in political information and starved for political clarity.
That gap is widening. We are wired to seek out what confirms the story we already hold. Year after year, the payoff for being loud has outrun the payoff for being right, and we’ve sorted ourselves into audiences that rarely see the same facts, let alone agree on them. When it is time for political debates, we have already picked a side, and our natural inclination is to root for our team rather than get to the truth.
One mechanism has been consistently strong as a full-spectrum signal processor rather than a narrow-band signal amplifier: the market. Markets make people back beliefs with capital, and capital has a way of sharpening judgment that pundit commentary never will. Anyone can hold a view for free; holding a financial position costs you if you’re wrong. What comes out the other end is a price: a continuously updated consensus of everyone with money and conviction on the line, stripped of the performance that dominates everywhere else. If you care what is likely to happen rather than what is smart or fashionable to say, the price is the better witness.
That is the case for what Kalshi launched: the Kalshi American Power Index, or KPOW. It is an S&P 500 for politics. It compresses a vast, churning system into one number you can track. KPOW runs on a scale from +50 on the Democratic side to +50 on the Republican side, and it blends two layers: a quarter of the weight reflects the certified reality of who controls the House, Senate, and presidency today, while three quarters reflects what Kalshi’s markets imply about who controls them next, assembled from six pieces, ranging from chamber control to expected seat margins to the odds of a government shutdown. The mechanics matter less than what they produce: a single line that moves when power actually shifts, not just when people comment on it.
What we find most compelling isn’t where the number sits on a given day; it’s what happens when it moves. A poll is a still photo taken on the afternoon someone happened to ask. An index is a continuous recording. A court ruling, a primary upset, or a shock from overseas shows up as a bend in the line you can point to and size. That converts vague arguments into something testable. Did the redistricting decision actually move power, or did it just own a news cycle? You used to be able to debate that endlessly. Now there’s a measurement to debate against.
Prediction markets built their reputation on questions with a finish line: a winner, a vote, a clear settlement. The questions that shape how we feel about the country mostly don’t have a single answer. “Which way is power tilting?” never resolves; it simply keeps shifting. An index is what allows a market to address a question like that, not by crowning a winner, but by returning a number, the way an equity index distills an entire economy into a single readable figure. Kalshi could already price the questions that end. As of today, it can price the ones that don’t.
And none of this exists without the exchange underneath it. An index is only as trustworthy as the markets feeding it, which means it requires the kind of liquidity, regulation, and settlement infrastructure that takes years to build. Kalshi has spent those years. And once that foundation exists, an index is just the first instrument it supports. The same layer can carry a whole catalog of contracts tied to questions that the legacy financial system was never designed to touch.
The defining questions of the coming decade, across politics, policy, technology, and markets, will mostly be the messy, never-quite-settled kind, and they’ll arrive buried in more noise than ever. The opportunity is to give people a way to measure those questions rather than just shouting past one another about them. That’s why we’re proud to back Tarek, Luana, and the Kalshi team. The contest for power will keep swinging back and forth. For the first time, we can actually watch it move.
OpenAI breaks ground on a 1GW data center project in Michigan as part of Stargate, building AI infrastructure to expand access, create jobs, and support communities.
In my last Week in Review post, I shared what I’d been hearing from customers in the AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AI-DLC) workshops I’ve been delivering. Last week I was back at it, this time in Denver for a two-day AI-DLC workshop, where I helped facilitate 17 teams to deliver nearly 20 separate use cases in just two days. The pace of acceleration that AI-DLC unlocks—especially when paired with tools like Claude Code on Amazon Bedrock—is fundamentally changing how businesses operate. Traditional roles within software development teams are collapsing into smaller, AI-augmented squads, and the paradigm shift is beginning to take place right in front of us. To learn more about how to utilize various AI tools, visit the GitHub repository of AI-DLC workflow.
This shift is also reshaping how AWS account teams (solutions architects, customer solutions managers, and technical account managers) collaborate with customers. It’s becoming less about handing off advisory design documents and more about building alongside them in real time. It’s a genuinely exciting moment to be in the middle of the change, and this week’s headline launch — Anthropic’s most capable model yet, now on AWS, is going to push that pace even further.
Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news…
Headlines Claude Opus 4.8 on AWS – Anthropic’s most capable generally available model is now accessible through both Amazon Bedrock and the Claude Platform on AWS. Opus 4.8 is built for agentic coding, knowledge work, and extended autonomous task execution — it sustains longer autonomous sessions with deeper reasoning, recovers from errors, and synthesizes information across lengthy documents. For coding workloads, it reads codebases like an engineer, plans before it edits, and holds context across long sessions. On Amazon Bedrock, you get AWS-managed features like Guardrails, Knowledge Bases, and data residency; on the Claude Platform on AWS, you get Anthropic’s native APIs unified with AWS billing. To learn more, visit the deep-dive blog post.
Last week’s launches Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:
Introducing the next generation of AWS Resilience Hub – A reimagined Resilience Hub gives SREs and developers a unified framework to define resilience standards, evaluate applications against them, and demonstrate compliance across an entire portfolio. It introduces modular resilience policies (covering service-level objectives (SLOs), multi-AZ/Region DR, and data recovery), business-oriented application modeling, generative AI-powered assessments aligned with the Well-Architected and Resilience Analysis Frameworks, and automatic dependency discovery via DNS query log analysis. Integration with AWS Organizations enables organization-wide resilience management from a single delegated administrator account.
Introducing the next generation of Amazon OpenSearch Serverless for building agentic AI applications – Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now a fully managed search and vector engine purpose-built for agentic AI applications. It scales from zero to thousands of requests per second—roughly 20x faster than the prior generation—delivers up to 60% cost savings versus peak-provisioned clusters, and adds GPU acceleration plus new SEARCH and VECTORSEARCH collection types. Native integrations with Vercel, Kiro, Claude Code, and Cursor through OpenSearch Agent Skills make it straightforward to plug into your agent stack.
New assessment capabilities in AWS Transform – AWS Transform expands with new tools to help you build migration business cases and evaluate TCO before moving workloads to AWS. You can ingest data from RVTools exports, CMDB data, the AWS Transform discovery tool, and third-party discovery tools, then run what-if scenarios across region, utilization, and service mapping for EC2, FSx, S3, SQL Server on EC2, and virtual desktops. The release also adds Agentic Readiness Analysis (ARA) and Modernization Analysis (MODA), which scan code repositories in 5 to 30 minutes per repo to surface severity-tagged findings with file-level evidence and AWS-mapped remediation guidance.
Amazon Aurora MySQL with Kiro Powers — Aurora MySQL now integrates with Kiro Powers, drawing from a curated repository of pre-packaged MCP servers, steering files, and hooks validated by Kiro partners. Developers can execute both data plane tasks (queries, schema management) and control plane tasks (cluster management) in natural language, with dynamic guidance for Aurora MySQL Serverless scaling, RDS-to-Aurora migration, and replication setup. The companion Database Blog post explains how the agent produces the API calls, SQL, and configuration for you to review and run — available via one-click install from the Kiro IDE or webpage.
Amazon WorkSpaces Applications now supports Windows Desktop OS – You can now bring your own Windows Desktop licenses to Amazon WorkSpaces Applications and stream full Windows desktops and applications from AWS-hosted dedicated hardware. BYOL eliminates OS fees (you pay only for compute and streaming infrastructure), supports eligible Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, and gives users a matching experience between local and remote environments — same workflows, shortcuts, and navigation in both.
For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.
Other AWS news Here are some additional posts and resources that you might find interesting:
Meet our newest AWS Heroes — May 2026 – An AWS Builder Center post introducing the latest cohort of AWS Heroes recognized for their contributions to the global AWS community.
AI-native, full-stack web apps with Vercel and AWS databases – Database blog post on the new Vercel and AWS Databases integration, which lets you provision Aurora PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, or Aurora DSQL directly from the Vercel dashboard or via v0. The post also highlights the H0 hackathon with $160,000 in prizes for building full-stack apps on this stack.
The largest debate that’ll define the future balance of power between the open and closed AI model ecosystems is primarily economic — it’s if users of AI will continue to pay dramatically more, i.e. large margins, for the top closed models. Early 2026 is a seminal time for the AI industry, as the coding agents1 have shown the first area where a huge AI market will continue to pay a substantial premium for better intelligence.
The other side of this dichotomy is the inevitable decay of API businesses at these same labs. These labs will realize they need to protect their best models, rolling them out later in APIs to both protect token supply, avoid distillation, and stick to use-cases with higher margins. All of these effects will be clearly visible in 5-10 year timelines, as in the near term markets, prices, margins, and demand will be dictated by a rapid buildout of compute (supply-limited in the near term) and mass subsidization of tokens (through continued investment in new AI companies).
The core of this argument rests in the obvious habit changes that are setting in with coding agents past the Opus 4.5 and Codex 5.2 thresholds. People are not making this switch because they are lazy, but because their net output is obviously higher when using an agent as an implementation aid for complex knowledge work. For people who rely on coding agents to work, they will always pay more for the best rather than settle for good enough. There are so many ways to make the product better, speed, intelligence, specialized models, etc.
I would pay $2000/month for the tools today, especially knowing they’ll get much better. At the same time, it is likely that many companies are forcing agents and usage onto people that actually will get very little out of them in their current form, which helps the AI buildout (or bubble) continue.
The best closed labs — right now this list is just Anthropic and OpenAI, but it’s reasonable to expect Google to catch up — will always make the most efficient models for intelligence at a given cost. Building models is a mass capital investment of talent, data, and compute. These systems, a combination of model weights, harnesses, tools, and serving infrastructure have massive returns on integration (where open models are designed to work across many, diverse serving situations). These integration benefits — the integration of hardware and new forms of software — can be expressed in any possible way of making models better.
The models in the near future may saturate on benchmark scores, but if that intelligence ceiling really is a cap on utility then the labs will optimize utility per second or per watt, serving users in another way. Improving the models is possible in every direction — there have been no walls in progress. We’re early in the mass buildout of intelligence, which involves harnessing the physical world to build numerous datacenters, organizing many AI researchers so that a large team can contribute to one model, and of course solving many small, low-level puzzles that unlock performance. Every indication is that there is still meaningful performance to be unlocked and the closed labs are the best set up to extract it.
The collective wisdom of the labs is that making the models smarter, in terms of the frontier of absolute intelligence, has the most value. This is the right call to me because it unlocks large new markets. Optimizing models at a fixed intelligence level locks in markets, expands accessibility over time, and increases return on investment for users (while potentially lowering margins for selling intelligence).
Many people are making this bet that models will keep getting better and are learning to work well in these harnesses, even though some workflows are still a bit clunky. This is the right bet. These people all will continue to use the absolutely best models available. It’s like buying an iPhone as a consumer. You could get an Android and suffer from a bunch of paper cuts to save money, but why would you? The returns to performance are even higher in the workplace, which drives pricing power.
In this mental model, the frontier labs as businesses, will look like new, reimagined forms of a mix of Apple and Microsoft. The Apple side is that they’re selling an integrated, extremely hard to replicate technology. The Microsoft side is selling high-leverage subscriptions across the economy. In 5-10 years I expect both OpenAI and Anthropic to be valued in the $2-10T range. The true frontier labs will be an oligopoly that looks like the cloud market today.
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On the other side of this equation is the open model economy. This isn’t to say that the frontier labs will dominate all aspects of AI use. Yes, I expect OpenAI and Anthropic to be the most representative companies of the AI boom (new companies, alongside Nvidia of course), but the collective value capture around open models will be far bigger overall, it’s just that the revenue and margins will be shared across a wide stack of companies.
Many businesses want to switch to open models but the models today are not good enough in out-of-distribution tasks. Eventually open model builders will stop chasing Claude and GPT on the Artificial Analysis index and fill this niche. This fork could be driven by economic factors, where they no longer have the revenue to support the growing R&D costs for continuing to scale models. It can also be driven by pure demand, where certain AI solutions only can exist at low price points present in open models. Where closed labs are an oligopoly, open model builders and users will be far more diverse and numerous. The total market value will dramatically exceed the cumulative value of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Open models are by their nature not integrated, so they will rely on multiple companies coordinating to serve them. Each of these layers will have alternatives, driving prices down to commodity pricing. These low, predictable prices will be where many enterprises enter to build in-house agents and tools for niche tasks. The predominant mode of deployment here is that enterprises find a model that hits a sufficient performance threshold on a task of interest and does not replace the model later (setup costs are high). As customizing models becomes easier, again in the open model finetuning stack we are seeing emerge (Tinker, Fireworks, Prime Intellect, etc.), this market becomes even bigger.
What this will look like in the coming years is a steady rise in open model inference proportion across the entrenched hyper-scale clouds of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and new AI infrastructure companies of Together, Fireworks, OpenRouter, etc when compared to OpenAI and Anthropic.
The closed models hit incredible product-market fit with the current agents, starting their integrated exponential by monetizing the top end of the knowledge work. The open model economy will take far longer, but it will also be far more satisfying to follow, as it tracks the broader diffusion of AI into the entire economy and world.
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In 1987, Richard Greenhill, a British photographer who was fascinated by (but had no actual training in) robotics, decided he wanted to build a life-size humanoid that could do useful things, like carrying luggage. He was working at a startup called Intergalactic Robots, but he couldn’t convince anyone there to build such a machine, so he set about building one himself, in his attic.
To help with his project, he organized a weekly get-together of a dozen or so like-minded folks. Every Wednesday night, his wife, Sally, would make a big pot of spaghetti, and the group would tinker with components scavenged from old printers and picked up from junkyards. They called themselves the Shadow Group. They eventually constructed several different robots, but their main project was the two-legged Shadow Walker.
In 1987, photographer Richard Greenhill organized a weekly gathering of DIY enthusiasts to work on projects in his attic, including the Shadow Walker. Richard Greenhill and David Buckley
Greenhill’s friend David Buckley, a robotics and animatronics expert he’d met at Intergalactic, sketched out a rough design based on medical textbooks of human bone structure and muscle movement. The robot’s skeleton, made of maple, was greatly simplified—only one bone in the lower leg and a single wide toe on each foot. The ankle’s double-axis design allowed for two degrees of movement. The knee had no complicating kneecap.
Greenhill didn’t want the robot to use motors, so its movement was controlled using compressed air to extend and contract 28 “air-muscles”—his version of a McKibben muscle, invented in the 1950s to mimic musculature with pneumatics. The muscles were connected to the bones across eight joints (hips, knees, ankles, toes), which provided 12 degrees of freedom.
The robot’s headless torso held the control valves, electronics, and computer interfaces. It stood 168 centimeters tall and 46 cm wide and weighed about 38 kilograms. The group managed to get the robot to stand up reliably and balance itself; it could even regain its center if pushed a little. But walking turned out to be more of a challenge.
Rich Walker joined the group as a teenager and began writing software to get the robot to stand. He was particularly interested in using neural networks to solve balancing problems, although he ran into a number of hardware obstacles, including the unreliability of the sensors and the valves, and the robot’s overall fragility. Over time, Walker and the team developed a standard library of routines to control the robot. Walker wrote a detailed description of the Shadow Walker in 1999, which is available on David Buckley’s website.
The 1st International Robot Olympics
By the time the Shadow Group began developing Shadow Walker, engineers in academia and industry had been working on robotics for several decades. The world’s first industrial robot, the Unimate, debuted in 1961, and in 1967 Donald Michie and others began building a series of Freddy robots to investigate machine intelligence. The IEEE created its first dedicated robotics organization in 1984 when it established the IEEE Robotics and Automation Council, which became the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society in 1987. Also in 1987, the nonprofit International Federation of Robotics was established to promote research, development, use, and cooperation in the field of robotics.
As Shadow Walker pushed the limits for a DIY humanoid robot, industrial humanoids were also gaining ground. In 1986, Honda began working on its experimental (E-series) and later the prototype (P-series) humanoid robots, finally unveiling the P2 in 1996. The P2 stood 183 cm tall and weighed 210 kg. It was the first humanoid capable of stable, autonomous walking. This work eventually led to the development of the groundbreaking ASIMO.
Greenhill’s friend, roboticist David Buckley, consulted medical textbooks to create Shadow Walker’s humanoid design.Richard Greenhill and David Buckley
In the late 1980s, the public was both fascinated and horrified by the potential of robots. Businesses saw robots as a way to increase productivity, while workers worried they would take their jobs. Children viewed them as wondrous toys, while people with disabilities embraced them as tools of liberation. Military experts hoped robots would fight wars without endangering human soldiers, while politicians pondered if robots might eventually get to vote. Philosophers thought robots could challenge our notions of intelligence (and stupidity), while the religious struggled with concerns about the human race in a robot-dominated future.
Shadow Walker’s simplified anatomy included only one bone in the lower leg and a single wide toe on each foot.Science Museum Group
Peter Mowforth, cofounder of the Turing Institute in Glasgow, noted these disparate visions for robots when he announced the 1st International Robot Olympics, to be held in 27 and 28 September 1990 and hosted by the Turing Institute and the University of Strathclyde. The Olympics would round up the world’s best robots and showcase them head-to-head.
Mowforth himself thought all of the competing visions of robots were overblown. Steeped in machine learning research and robotics development, he knew firsthand the limitations of the state of the art: Robots rarely worked as intended, easily broke down, and glitched over seemingly trivial problems. He envisioned the Robot Olympics as a testbed to assess what the latest generation of robots could and could not do.
At the 1990 Robot Olympics, held in Glasgow, Shadow Walker wore pants to conceal its pneumatic “air-muscles” from competitors.Adam Hart-Davis/Science Source
The call for participation was wide open. Instead of having predetermined categories of competition, the organizers opted to see who applied to compete and then group them based on their claimed capabilities. In addition to picking the winners of individual events, the judges would select an overall Olympic champion based on the quality of the hardware, the sophistication of behavior, and novelty. Other prizes were given for young competitors, technologies that showed commercial potential, and design. In the end, more than 50 robots were entered, from a mix of universities, industry, and hobbyist groups from Canada, France, India, Japan, Mexico, the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia.
There were plenty of disappointments. Trolleyman, a golf-cart-like wheeled robot, suffered a power failure while carrying the opening Olympic torch through the streets of Glasgow. The pile rug in the arena tripped up many robots that had been trained only on flat, smooth floors. David Buckley later concluded that the events were too difficult, and that the Olympics didn’t push development forward.
Of course, there were winners. In a surprise triumph for vintage technology, the fully mechanical 19th-century Japanese Archer from the Museum of Automata in York, England, won gold in javelin, beating out competitors more than 100 years its junior. The overall Olympic Champion was Yamabico, Shoji Suzuki’s entry from the University of Tsukuba, in Japan, which won bronze in obstacle avoidance and gold in wall following, but was disqualified in the talking category for not speaking English.
The Shadow Group had high hopes for Shadow Walker. Unfortunately, though, it failed to take a step, and the biped race was won by the Cardiff University Biped. Shadow Walker now resides in the collections of the Science Museum in London.
The Legacy of Shadow Walker
In 1997, a paying customer in search of a robotic leg compelled the Shadow Group to get serious and become a registered company. Shadow Robot is now Britain’s oldest robotics company. Rich Walker, who had left the Shadow Group to earn a B.A. in mathematics and a diploma in computer science at the University of Cambridge, joined Shadow Robot in 1999 as technical director. Today he’s the director of the company.
Shadow Robot specializes in durable robot hands rather than walking robots. But the focus on hands is also a legacy of the Shadow Group. Walker remembers that the Shadow Group’s first humanoid hand in the late 1990s was impressive simply for being able to pick up a pint of beer (a smooth-sided, thin-walled glass). Today, Shadow Robot’s hands are testbeds for dexterity. Gone are the pneumatic muscles, replaced by actuators that move each finger with precision. The classic model contains 20 motors, allowing for abductive and adductive movement with 24 degrees of freedom.
Shadow Walker’s operator wore a data suit that captured his movements and allowed the robot to copy them.Richard Greenhill
In a recent blog post, Sejal Parsotomo, senior marketing executive at Shadow Robot, wrote that while humanoid robots are great for public relations, specialized dexterity is key for success: A robot that can walk into your factory may be impressive, but a robot that can reliably manipulate objects is transformative.
In its struggles to take more than a few steps, the Shadow Walker showed the inherent difficulty that robots had in mastering even low-level skills. In August 2025, Beijing hosted the World Humanoid Robot Games. Competing in sports such as gymnastics, soccer, and track events, as well as more “useful” tasks like hotel cleaning and sorting medicine, these robots could literally have run circles around the competitors in the first Robot Olympics 35 years earlier. And yet, there is still so much work needed in order for robots to navigate the human-built environment. Despite the astonishing progress, we’re still not all that close to actually useful humanoid robots.
Part of a continuing serieslooking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.
An abridged version of this article appears in the June 2026 print issue as “Learning to Walk.”
References
Richard Greenhill gives an overview of his life and the founding of the Shadow Group in a post on Shadow Robot’s corporate website.
David Buckley has a compilation of resources on the Shadow Biped Walker, including specifications from the 1999 iteration and a brochure from the 1st International Robot Olympics.
There is coverage of the Robot Olympics worthy of a gossip sheet in La Repubblicaand lovely footage of the competition in this TV-am interview of Peter Mowforth by Lorraine Kelly.
Modern LLM serving is hard to tune because each deployment is a stack of interacting choices: model backend, tensor-parallel shape, prefill/decode split, worker...
Modern LLM serving is hard to tune because each deployment is a stack of interacting choices: model backend, tensor-parallel shape, prefill/decode split, worker counts, scheduler settings, routing policy, KV cache behavior, autoscaling thresholds, and topology. Those choices interact across layers, and a local improvement can shift the bottleneck somewhere else. For larger models…
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Robots are rapidly becoming part of our everyday lives, from drones and industrial machines to home assistants and humanoid robots. As their presence continues to grow, an important question arises: How can we choose the right robot—not only in terms of performance and cost but also in terms of sustainability? This video introduces the Eco‑Score for Robots, a new approach to evaluating the environmental impact of robotic systems. Just as eco-labels help consumers make informed choices in other industries, the Robotics Eco‑Label provides a clear and transparent way to assess how sustainable a robot truly is.
Robotic manipulation has come a long way since the 1990s. We’ve gone from the two-ball paddle juggling robot to AthenaZero, who can juggle barehanded using onboard vision feedback. By moving away from task-specific passive end-effectors such as cups or paddles and using multifingered hands, it can transition between a wide range of patterns including cascade, half-shower, tennis, shower, and box.
We show here the ARISTO (Anthropomorphic, Robotic, Integrated-Sensing, Tendon-Operated) Hand. Developed in collaboration with Sony Group Corporation, this research platform is engineered to address the complex requirements of manipulating small, thin, and fragile objects.
Moby shows what useful mobile manipulation looks like in the real world: picking up, carrying, and placing adaptable payloads. The video shows payload handling across increasing crate loads, including a 50.3-pound load, while maintaining balance, control, and mobility. This is the kind of capability that matters outside the lab—moving real objects, in real spaces, with practical reliability.
What does it take to make a robot look human? Harvard SEAS students Hailey Block, Henry Tavistock, and Evan Crowley created “Hollow Minds,” a pair of animatronic heads capable of speaking, blinking, tracking movement, and displaying lifelike facial expressions.
The longevity here is impressive, but the obvious question here is why the heck you’d ever do this task with a bipedal humanoid robot. It also doesn’t seem to have any error recovery, which is obviously fixable, but highlights the fact that real humans are versatile and humanoid robots are not.
Kacper Nowicki, CEO and cofounder of Nomagic, recently sat down for a deep dive into the “humanoid vs. purpose-built” debate during a panel discussion at the Web Summit in Vancouver 2026.
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The rise of autonomous, long-running AI agents has introduced a new class of compute demand, namely tasks that maintain large context windows, spawn concurrent...