The Shocking Truth About The NEO Humanoid Robot

So 1X Technologies just dropped what they’re calling the world’s first consumer-ready humanoid robot — the NEO — and I have to say, the reality behind this thing is way more interesting (and controversial) than the hype videos suggest. Let me break down what’s really going on here.

What Is the NEO Robot?

NEO is a humanoid robot built by 1X Technologies, an American-Norwegian company backed by OpenAI. Standing at 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighing just 30 kg (about 66 pounds), it’s designed to live in your home and help with everyday tasks. Think folding laundry, loading the dishwasher, tidying rooms, watering plants, and fetching items — basically a robotic housekeeper.

The design is intentionally soft and approachable. NEO uses a patented Tendon Drive system that mimics biological muscle structure, making its movements gentle, compliant, and quieter than a modern refrigerator. It has 75 total degrees of freedom across its body, with 22 degrees of freedom per hand for human-level dexterity. The whole thing is wrapped in a sleek 3D-printed nylon-knit exterior that makes it look more like a mannequin in a turtleneck than a Terminator.

The “Shocking Truth” — It Needs Humans to Work

Here’s where things get really interesting. Despite all the impressive demo videos showing NEO autonomously doing chores, the reality is that much of what you’ve seen is actually being controlled by human operators wearing VR headsets. When The Wall Street Journal got hands-on with NEO, the robot wasn’t performing any tasks autonomously during the demo.

1X calls this “Expert Mode” — users can schedule sessions where remote operators teleoperate the robot using Quest 3 headsets to perform complex household tasks. The idea is that while these human experts control NEO, its onboard AI (called Redwood) observes and records every action, essentially learning new skills from watching the human do it. Each session becomes training data that makes the AI smarter over time.

So in a very real sense, early NEO buyers aren’t just getting a robot — they’re funding a massive real-world data collection operation. As 1X CEO Bernt Børnich put it: “If we don’t have your data, we can’t make the product better.”

The Privacy Elephant in the Room

This is where the controversy really heats up. Having a camera-equipped humanoid robot in your home that can be remotely controlled by a stranger raises some serious privacy red flags. A remote operator can literally see inside your home through NEO’s cameras while controlling it.

To their credit, 1X has been transparent about this and has implemented several safeguards:

• All remote operators are vetted employees based in the USA
• Users can set “no-go zones” that operators cannot enter
• People can be blurred out from the operator’s view
• Operators can never connect without explicit user approval
• Users can opt out of data sharing entirely

Børnich frames it as a “big sister” principle — the more data you share, the more useful NEO becomes. But critics on Reddit and social media have called it everything from a “privacy nightmare” to an “expensive puppet.” The r/privacy community was particularly vocal, with many pointing out that the technology simply isn’t ready for the infinite variables found in people’s homes.

The AI Brain Behind NEO — Redwood

Under the hood, NEO runs on Redwood AI, a vision-language transformer model with 160 million parameters that runs directly on the robot’s embedded GPU. This enables privacy-preserving, low-latency processing and even offline operation for basic tasks.

Redwood fuses vision tokens, language embeddings, and proprioceptive data (the robot’s sense of its own body position) to create an integrated understanding of its environment. It can engage in natural conversation, remember details about its surroundings, and even suggest recipes based on what’s in your fridge. The conversational AI component is powered by a built-in large language model with 5G connectivity.

From day one, NEO can handle simple autonomous tasks like opening doors, fetching specific items, and turning lights on and off. But for anything more complex — like actually folding that laundry neatly — it still needs the human-in-the-loop approach, at least for now.

What Does It Cost?

NEO launched for pre-order in October 2025 with two pricing options:

• Early Access Purchase: $20,000 (with a $200 refundable deposit), including priority delivery in 2026
• Subscription Plan: $499 per month, planned for a later rollout

It comes in three colors — tan, gray, and dark brown — and ships with a 3-year warranty for early access units. Currently available for US customers only, with plans to expand to Canada, UK, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Norway.

For context, that $20,000 price tag is actually competitive when you consider that a daily maid service can easily cost more per year. But you’re essentially paying to be a beta tester for technology that’s still learning to walk — literally.

The Bigger Picture — 10,000 Robots by 2030

1X isn’t just thinking about homes. In December 2025, they struck a deal with EQT to ship up to 10,000 NEO robots between 2026 and 2030 to EQT’s 300+ portfolio companies, focusing on manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, and industrial use cases. The latest iteration, NEO Gamma, features improved specs including a 2.3 kWh battery providing about 3 hours of continuous operation with a 2-hour charge time.

Meanwhile, competitors like Tesla with Optimus and Figure AI are also racing to bring humanoid robots to market. Elon Musk has announced plans to commercialize household humanoid robots by the end of 2026. The humanoid robotics space is heating up fast, and NEO is positioning itself as the first mover in the consumer segment.

My Take

Look, I think what 1X is doing with NEO is genuinely fascinating — and genuinely concerning at the same time. The honesty about needing human teleoperation is refreshing in an industry full of hype videos and vaporware. But asking people to pay $20,000 to essentially be data collection nodes for your AI training pipeline is a bold ask.

The technology is real, the engineering is impressive, and the soft-body approach to home robotics makes way more sense than putting a rigid industrial robot in your living room. But right now, NEO is less of a finished product and more of a very expensive bet on the future. If you’re an early adopter with deep pockets and a high tolerance for privacy trade-offs, NEO might be the most interesting piece of technology you can buy in 2026. For everyone else, I’d say watch this space closely — because when these robots actually become autonomous, everything changes.