Picture this: your next Amazon package handed to you—well, “handed”—by a humanoid robot. That’s no longer sci-fi. According to a leak reported by The Information, Amazon is already developing the software that will let these bots move and think, aiming for two clear goals: deliver orders even faster and cut operating costs.
To put them through their paces, Amazon has set up a small “humanoid park” in San Francisco—about the size of a coffee shop—turned into an obstacle course for prototype testing. For now, the company is using third-party models, including one from Chinese firm Unitree that’s popular for its relatively modest $16 k price tag. Amazon reportedly plans to buy additional units from other manufacturers, too.
The brains of these future robo-couriers rely on open-source AI models like DeepSeek-VL2 and Alibaba’s Qwen. Their superpower is multimodality—the ability to process images, text, and other signals at once to read the environment and plan each movement down to the inch.
Once everything’s ready, the humanoids will team up with Amazon’s autonomous delivery vehicles from Zoox—the company Amazon acquired in 2020, best known for its robotaxi service. The concept: the self-driving car brings the packages to your neighborhood, and the humanoid robot walks them to your door. Call it a tag-team built for faster, cheaper—and undeniably futuristic—deliveries.
