In a video posted to Instagram, EngineAI CEO Zhao Tongyang geared up in leg, stomach, and head pads. Workers taunted him, asking if he was nervous.
The company’s T800 robot then appeared to kick Tongyang in the stomach, and he can be seen falling to the ground.
“Too violent!” Tongyang said in a translation. “Too brutal!”
The video featuring its CEO came after EngineAI posted a separate video of its humanoid robot doing kicks and flips. Online skeptics made accusations that the bot in the video was CGI, so the company’s next video showed the robot landing a kick to the CEO’s stomach.
In a comment under its latest video, EngineAI wrote that the startup was “curious” what it felt like for the T800 to kick someone, so they did an “experiment” to find out.
The video has since amassed over 17,000 likes on Instagram. The first video, which was accused of being CGI, has over 42,000 likes. It is unclear whether EngineAI’s T800 was tele-operated or moved independently.
EngineAI raised $180.69 million in December 2025, per PitchBook, in a funding round led by Chinese investment groups HPR Capital, Tsinghua Holdings Capital, and Henan Investment Group.
“In 2026, the Zhongqing team will fully promote the scenario-based verification and large-scale deployment of the product,” EngineAI commented on one of the videos. “It will empower industrial upgrading with technological strength and reshape a new ecosystem of human-robot coexistence.”
Morgan Stanley released a list of the 25 companies it predicted would dominate the humanoid robotics market, ranging from Nvidia to Sony. The investment bank estimated the market will be worth more than $5 trillion by 2050. EngineAI was not included on Morgan Stanley’s list.
Tesla’s Optimus robot has also thrown some kicks and jabs. On the red carpet of “Tron: Ares,” Optimus performed Kung Fu with actor Jared Leto. On his third-quarter earnings call, CEO Elon Musk said that “nobody was controlling” the robot.
Tele-operation is still common in humanoid robots. Neo, the laundry-folding and dishwasher-filling robot that went viral on X, still requires the control of a human outside the residence as it works on training it to perform more autonomous tasks.
Many Optimus bots from Tesla are tele-operated, including the ones that were bartending at an event last year. The company is moving away from tele-operation-based training and toward collecting data using only cameras, Business Insider reported in August.
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