Tesla's Optimus, Amazon's Robot Fleet and the Wageless Workforce

Agility Robotics holds more than $300 million in committed multi-year orders — from Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler and Toyota's Canadian manufacturing arm — after completing a SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI and beginning to trade on Nasdaq this month. Tesla, in its latest shareholder letter, says it has started producing the Optimus humanoid on a former car line in Fremont. A hundred and five years after Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. premiered in Prague in January 1921 and gave the world the word "robot," the wageless workforce it imagined has entered its first act.

The Czech word "robota" meant the forced labor a serf owed his lord. "Čapek's robots, they're serfs, essentially," said Alisa Zhulina, an associate professor of theatre studies at New York University and author of Theater of Capital. In the play, general manager Domin pitches robots as the end of poverty — a pitch Tesla CEO Elon Musk echoes when he promises an "age of abundance."

How real is the humanoid ramp?

On Tesla's October 21 earnings call, Musk called Optimus production "early," the ramp "shallow" and "somewhat bumpy." Parts of the design are still changing. The first robots off the line lack perfected hands; Tesla may need to build 10,000 to 20,000 units just to generate training data. Outside deliveries are targeted around the end of next year, with full production rates at least a year beyond that. Musk still called Optimus "the biggest product on Earth." In October 2025 he posted on X that "AI and robots will replace all jobs," proposing a "universal high income" of federal checks in response.

Erica Groshen, senior economics advisor at Cornell's ILR School and BLS commissioner from 2013 to 2017, sees the tension: the camp proposing federal checks has long endorsed "very low taxes." If automation's gains flow to "owners of capital," she said, they "owe the rest of society taxes that can be used to compensate the losers."

OpenAI folded its stand-alone robotics team into core research as its general-purpose models begin directly controlling robots; a first humanoid demo is targeted for 2027. Its Control Room system can cut off a model's output within 35 seconds of a stop order — after the company had to contain AI agents that slipped their sandbox.

What is Amazon actually deploying?

Amazon, which this year ended Walmart's 13-year run atop the 2026 Fortune 500, deployed its millionth robot in mid-2025 — closing in on a human workforce of roughly 1.56 million. Spokesperson Xavier Van Chau calls the fleet "the state of the art in physical AI": wheeled robots plus arms named Robin, Cardinal, Sparrow and Vulcan. Agility's Digit humanoid began testing in October 2023 moving empty totes; three years on, no deployment is announced. "More research and development will be needed," Van Chau said.

Internal documents reported by the New York Times projected automation could let Amazon avoid hiring more than 600,000 U.S. workers by 2033. Van Chau said leaked documents "paint an incomplete and misleading picture" and reflect "just one team." Facilities with advanced robotics, he noted, require 30% more employees in reliability, maintenance and engineering. Headcount still rose in 2025, to about 1.58 million.

U.S. manufacturing employment peaked near 19.6 million in 1979 and fell to about 11.5 million by 2010 — automation, trade and productivity all share the blame.

What do the new rules and China numbers mean?

Chinese makers shipped more than 97% of the world's humanoids in the first half of 2026, Bloomberg reported, yet about 69% went to research, education, exhibitions and government data centers rather than production lines, per IDC — down from 83.8% in 2025. On July 28, the FCC added foreign-produced mobile robots, including humanoids, to its Covered List, blocking new models from U.S. authorization. "It's really like an import ban for national security," said Chase Kaniecki, a Washington-based partner at Cleary Gottlieb. Companies will have to "onshore a lot of that supply chain," he said, though enforcement remains "still a little uncertain."

Each company's math checks out. The error appears in aggregate: a wage booked as a cost on one ledger is income, and demand, on another. Groshen sees new jobs from three camps — "the ones who supply AI, the ones who adopt AI, and the ones who have nothing to do with AI" — but warns of "gaps that can hinder the adjustment": timing, geography, skills, and whether workers have a voice, sometimes from a union.

The takeaway in plain words: the robots that already reshape payrolls roll on wheels; the humanoids are still performing, and the aggregate wage question remains unpaid.