Friday, 13 June 2025

Amazon Reportedly Developing ‘Humanoid Robots’ For Package Deliveries

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Amazon is reportedly developing AI software to enable humanoid robots for package deliveries.

The Information first reported the development.

According to the report, the humanoid robots would ride around in Rivian electric vans and deliver packages.

From The Verge:

Citing an anonymous source “involved in the effort,” The Information says that Amazon has almost finished constructing an indoor “humanoid park” at one of the retail giant’s San Francisco offices that’s roughly the size of a coffee shop. The obstacle course reportedly contains one Rivian van for training purposes, with Amazon aiming to have humanoid robots “hitch a ride in the back of Amazon’s electric Rivian vans and spring out to deliver packages.”

The report coincides with Amazon launching a new agentic AI team to help develop technologies that will power robots “operating in Amazon distribution and logistics hubs.” In a statement to Silicon Valley, Amazon says that “instead of rigid, specialized robots, we’re creating systems that can hear, understand, and act on natural language commands, turning warehouse robots into flexible, multi-talented assistants.”

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One of the biggest concerns with AI is the technology eliminating countless jobs in the workforce currently performed by humans.

The fear applies to blue-collar and white-collar jobs.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, warned AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spark massive unemployment of 10-20% within five years.

“AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we’re going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it,” Amodei told CNN‘s Anderson Cooper.

“AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do,” he added.

Amodei said AI has rapidly progressed from the level of a “smart high school student” to the level of a “smart college student.”

He warned entry-level jobs in finance, consulting, tech, and similar fields will be on the chopping block.

“It’s hard to predict the future but we may indeed have a serious employment crisis on our hands,” Amodei said.

WATCH:

The Guardian reports:

Even with a human driver behind the wheel, a robot could theoretically speed up drop-off times by visiting one address while the human employee delivers to another. Amazon also has an interest in self-driving vehicles through its Zoox unit.

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Amazon has more than 20,000 Rivians in the US and has placed one of the vans in the humanoid testing zone, according to the report. Once it has tested the robots in the humanoid park, it plans to take them on “field trips” in the real world where they will attempt to deliver packages to homes.

Amazon has already conducted trials with humanoid robots, deploying devices developed by the US company Agility Robotics in its warehouses. The chief executive of Agility, Peggy Johnson, told the Guardian last year that the company’s Digit robot allowed employees to hand off work to humanoids and become a “robot manager”.

Last year Amazon was given permission to test-fly drones beyond a human controller’s line of sight in the UK, paving the way for using the technology in home delivery.

Prof Subramanian Ramamoorthy, the chair of robot learning and autonomy at the University of Edinburgh, said Amazon had a respected robotics team and its reported focus on “last mile” delivery was not a surprise. The humanoid robot hardware capable of carrying out such a task is becoming available and the field is developing rapidly, he said. However, he added, the challenge was to achieve reliable performance outside highly constrained environments such as the reported “humanoid park”.


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