Russia's First AI-Powered Robot Suffered An Embarrassing Fate

First impressions are everything, even when you're a robot. Unfortunately for AIdol, the first artificial intelligence-powered robot made in Russia, things went about as poorly as possible. On the surface, the robot appeared to be everything science fiction fans have been waiting a century for — a shiny silver humanoid designed for lifelike movements and gestures. At a Moscow tech forum in late 2025, AIdol finally made its much-anticipated debut, walking onto the stage to the triumphant sound of "Gonna Fly Now," the theme song to the movie "Rocky." As it faced the crowd, AIdol waved hello, then immediately fell on its face.

Event organizers rushed to recover AIdol, covering it in a black sheet as if it were a homicide victim before dragging it away. The company behind the robot, Idol, later blamed the mishap on calibration issues in its motion control algorithm. By then though, the footage had already gone viral on social media, spawning a stream of jokes. There was something cathartic in the humor. It was a chance to laugh at both AI and the Russian state, two things that have fostered great fear in the 2020s.

With technology taking ever-larger leaps forward, many have legitimate concerns that AI could overtake humans at some point. AIdol's tumble might ease those fears a little. Even before it fell, the robot had looked slow and clumsy. It's an embarrassment that many other robots have shared. For all the hype that tech entrepreneurs have been building, robots are a long way from perfection.

With the pace of technological advancements this decade, people are asking big questions like whether AI is good or bad for humanity. This requires facing the frightening possibility that AI could overtake humans, and it's kind of a relief to have that fear broken up by watching a robot faceplant onstage. There are a lot of stories in this very same vein, demonstrations of supposedly state-of-the-art AI-powered robots that went horribly wrong in the end.

Ten months before AIdol's debut, Chinese robotics company Unitree demonstrated its H1 robot at a festival, where the AI failed to recognize a crowd barrier and the robot lunged at a terrified spectator. Over the summer, China hosted the first World Humanoid Robot Games, where a boxing robot got knocked down by tripping over its own feet, and another robot had to drop out of the 1500-meter race because it ran so hard its head fell off.

Perhaps the most embarrassing robot failure of 2025 befell one of Tesla's Optimus robots. During a demonstration at Miami's renowned Art Basel festival, an Optimus unit clumsily knocked over a table of water bottles, then fell on its back. Internet sleuths quickly noted that just before the robot fell, it reached up in a motion like someone removing a headset, suggesting that Optimus was controlled by a person, not AI as Elon Musk has claimed. AI robots could still overtake us someday, but failures like these suggest we still have time before technological singularity.