Breaking the cage

Digit has moved more than 100,000 totes in live warehouses for the logistics firm GXO, with paying multi-year contracts there and at Toyota Canada and Mercado Libre. That makes the 5-foot-9, ostrich-kneed biped one of the only humanoids doing real commercial work for money rather than starring in a demo video. The catch is the enclosure: federal safety rules mean Digit does that work alone, sealed inside a Plexiglas cage — the literal opposite of the industry's pitch about robots working alongside people.

If a human approaches the humanoid, it has to take action to bring itself down to the ground and ensure that no harm is done.

At the Abundance Summit in March, CEO Peggy Johnson said the cage comes off by the end of 2026. The fix is almost comically literal: a 'cooperatively safe' Digit that, when a person gets close, lowers itself to the floor and stops, so it cannot do harm. Remove the cage and one robot can finally share a floor with the workers it stands next to.

The economics are why that matters. Johnson put Digit's running cost at $10-25 an hour today, heading for $2-3, against roughly $20 for US manufacturing labor — and pegged the next model's lift target at 50 pounds, exactly the limit OSHA sets for what a person may safely carry by hand. The machine is being engineered, line by line, to legally do the tasks humans are capped at. The wall between a working humanoid and the warehouse floor is, for now, a sheet of plastic.