Just posted to my Forbes column about Boston Dynamics’ newest Atlas humanoid … and why one quote from its CEO really stood out to me.
This week at CES in Las Vegas, Boston Dynamics unveiled its latest Atlas robot, and the numbers alone are striking: the entire 2026 production run is already sold, and its majority owner Hyundai Motor Group is planning a robot factory capable of shipping 30,000 units a year. Atlas is built for serious work—fully electric, able to lift heavy loads, operate in harsh environments, swap its own batteries, and run autonomously or under human supervision.
What really caught my attention, though, was CEO Robert Playter’s focus on the home.
Even though the first Atlas robots are headed to Hyundai and Google DeepMind, Playter framed Atlas as a step toward robots that eventually “walk into our homes and help make our lives safer, more productive, and more fulfilling.” With DeepMind helping develop new visual-language-action models, that long-term vision suddenly feels a bit less like science fiction—even if the robot is clearly an industrial powerhouse today.