Chinese humanoid robots could soon surpass human sprinting speeds, potentially outpacing Olympic champion Usain Bolt in the 100 meters, according to the founder of Chinese robotics firm Unitree Robotics.

Speaking at the Yabuli China Entrepreneurs Forum on Tuesday, Unitree's founder, Wang Xingxing, said that while robots currently lag behind humans in sprint races, that gap could close rapidly.

The comments follow Zhejiang University and Shanghai robotics company JingShi Technology's announcement in February of the launch of Bolt, a full-size humanoid robot that reached a peak running speed of 10 meters per second, which they said is the fastest full-size running robot in the world.

"In a few months, by around mid-year, humanoid robots globally — especially in China — may run faster than humans," Wang said. "Their 100-meter sprint times could drop below 10 seconds."

If realized, such performance would place robots ahead of Bolt's world-record time of 9.58 seconds, marking a symbolic milestone in the development of embodied artificial intelligence.

Wang, however, cautioned that the sector still faces significant technological hurdles before achieving a breakthrough comparable to the impact of ChatGPT on generative AI.

The most critical bottleneck, he said, lies in limited generalization capabilities. While robots can achieve near-perfect task success rates in pre-trained environments, their performance drops sharply when conditions change, making it difficult to adapt to the variability and unpredictability of real-world settings.