The war with Iran and ensuing blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping lane, has spiked oil prices and sent governments scrabbling for their reserves. How high will prices go, and how bad could it get?

On Friday night, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby published a memo to his employees showing that his very fuel-dependent business is prepping for a very long fallout. “Our plans assume oil goes to $175/barrel and doesn’t get back down to $100/barrel until the end of 2027,” he wrote.

Jet fuel accounts for between a quarter and a third of airlines’ operating costs. Prices have doubled from $70 a barrel since the war started four weeks ago, threatening to seriously cut into airlines’ profitability. Kirby said that his airline has a strategy: United will cut some 5 percent of its planned flight schedule during the second and third quarters of this year, with trims coming especially in off-peak periods like red-eyes and less popular travel days: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays.

“Honestly, I think there’s a good chance it won’t be that bad,” Kirby wrote in the memo, “but … there isn’t much downside for us to prepare for that outcome.”

United’s moves are significant for not only the travel industry but the wider global economy, analysts say. If it all plays out the way Kirby predicts, “this would be incredibly unwelcome news to everyone who is not in the oil refining business,” says Jason Miller, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University’s Eli Broad College of Business.

Airlines might be a particularly notable canary in the economic coal mine because their business leans even more heavily on oil prices, and especially refined oil prices, than most. Air transportation ranks just below asphalt paving as the US industry that spends the greatest share of its non-labor costs on refined petroleum products, Miller has calculated. Kirby’s predictions, while dire, are in line with what others in the commodity market are predicting, Miller says.

“Economically, this energy shock is hitting at the worst time possible,” Miller says. Add its effects to a sluggish job market and a global economy shaken by the US’s erratic tariff regime, and economists start to think about recession. The Iran war and the ensuing energy crisis “have played out longer than many expected it to,” Miller says. Kirby’s memo is an acknowledgment that “Hormuz may not be open for business very quickly.”

The effects of the fuel price spikes are already affecting the travel industry. Last week, American Airlines CEO Robert Isom said the company had spent an additional $400 million on fuel. Airlines have reported strong demand in the past weeks, with United’s Kirby noting in his memo that the past 10 weeks had seen the airline take in the most revenue on bookings ever. But it remains to be seen whether lots of people are actually enthusiastic about travel, or flyers spooked about geopolitics and fears of high ticket prices moved early to lock in their plans before oil costs got higher. Isom noted that, if oil prices remain high, “we’re certainly going to be nimble in terms of capacity, to make sure that supply and demand stay in balance.”

How bad it could get for airlines—and its passengers—depends not just on how long oil prices stay elevated, but how long the businesses’ questions about the crisis remain unanswered.

“If we stay in this uncertainty for a long time, this is adding to the complexity,” says Ahmed Abdelghany, who studies airline operations as a professor in Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s College of Business. “The longer it goes, the more problematic to the airlines that remain.”

An anonymous Substack post published this week accuses compliance startup Delve of “falsely” convincing “hundreds of customers they were compliant” with privacy and security regulations, potentially exposing those customers to “criminal liability under HIPAA and hefty fines under GDPR.”

Delve is a Y Combinator-backed startup that last year announced raising a $32 million Series A at a $300 million valuation. (The round was led by Insight Partners.) On Friday, the startup attempted to refute the accusations on its blog, calling the Substack post “misleading” and saying it “contains a number of inaccurate claims.”

The Substack post is credited to “DeepDelver,” who described themselves as working at a (now former) Delve client. In response to emailed questions from TechCrunch, DeepDelver said that they and their collaborators “chose to remain anonymous out of fear for retaliation by Delve.”

In their post, DeepDelver recounted receiving an email in December claiming the startup had “leaked a spreadsheet with confidential client reports.” While Delve CEO Karun Kaushik apparently assured customers in a subsequent email that they were in compliance and that no external party gained access to sensitive data, DeepDelver said they and other customers had become suspicious.

“Having the shared experience of being underwhelmed with the Delve experience, and having the overall sense that something fishy was going on, we decided to pool resources and investigate together,” they wrote.

Their conclusion? That Delve “achieves its claim of being the fastest platform by producing fake evidence, generating auditor conclusions on behalf of certification mills that rubber stamp reports, and skipping major framework requirements while telling clients they have achieved 100% compliance.”

DeepDelver went into considerable detail about those claims, accusing the startup of providing customers with “fabricated evidence of board meetings, tests, and processes that never happened,” then forcing those customers to “choose between adopting fake evidence or performing mostly manual work with little real automation or AI.”

DeepDelver also claimed that virtually all of Delve’s clients seem to have gone through two audit firms, Accorp and Gradient, which they described as “part of the same operation,” one that operates primarily in India, with only a nominal presence in the United States.

Those firms, they said, are just rubber-stamping reports that were generated by Delve. As a result, DeepDelver said the startup “inverts” the normal compliance structure: “By generating auditor conclusions, test procedures, and final reports before any independent review occurs, Delve places itself in the role of both implementer and examiner. This is not a technicality. It is a structural fraud that invalidates the entire attestation.”

In addition to accusing Delve of misleading its customers, DeepDelver said the startup is helping those customers “mislead the public by hosting trust pages that contain security measures that were never implemented.” 

DeepDelver said that while their company was discussing its issues with Delve, the startup “sent us multiple boxes of donuts […] to keep us happy.” Nonetheless, DeepDelver’s employer supposedly unpublished its trust page and no longer relies on the startup for compliance.

Delve responded to the accusations by saying it does not issue compliance reports at all. Instead, it’s an “automation platform” that ingests information about compliance, then provides auditors with access to that information.

“Final reports and opinions are issued solely by independent, licensed auditors, not Delve,” the company said.

Delve also said that its customers “can opt to work with an auditor of their choosing or opt to work with one from Delve’s network of independent, accredited third-party audit firms.” Those auditors, the startup said, are “established firms used broadly across the industry, including by other compliance platforms.”

In response to the accusation that it’s providing customers with “fake evidence,” Delve countered that it’s simply offering “templates to help teams document their processes in accordance with compliance requirements, as do other compliance platforms.”

“Draft templates are not the same as ‘pre-filled evidence,’” the company said.

Delve added that it is “actively investigating any leaks” and is “still reviewing the Substack.”

When asked about Delve’s response, DeepDelver told TechCrunch that they were “baffled by the laziness, clumsiness and brazenness of it.”

“They are trying to snake their way out [of] being held accountable by denying having ‘pre-filled evidence’ but calling it ‘templates’ instead, effectively shifting the blame to customers for adopting the ‘templates’ as is,” DeepDelver said. “They’re claiming they are not the ones to ‘issue’ the report, which is easy to claim if you define issuing a report as providing the final stamp.”

They added that there are “a number of very serious allegations” that Delve did not address at all: “The India accusation, the lack of AI (they only talk about ‘automations’), and the trust (lol) page containing controls that were never implemented.”

Apparently DeepDelver isn’t done with its criticism, as it promised, “Part II will follow soon.”

In addition, following the initial Substack post, an X user named James Zhou said they were able to gain access to sensitive information from Delve, such as employee background checks and equity vesting schedules. Dvuln founder Jamieson O’Reilly shared more details from what O’Reilly said was a conversation with Zhou about “several gaping security holes in Delve’s external attack surface.”

TechCrunch sent an email seeking additional comment to the media contact address listed on Delve’s website. The email bounced, but after this article was published, I received a calendar invite for a “Delve demo” later this week.

This post was initially published on March 21, 2026. It has been updated with emailed answers from DeepDelver, additional information about purported security vulnerabilities provided by Jamieson O’Reilly, and additional details about Delve’s response to TechCrunch.

Elon Musk has announced the Terafab project, a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and xAI, to build the “largest chip manufacturing facility ever.” In his usual grandiose fashion, Musk claims Terafab is the next step towards harnessing the power of the sun and creating a “galactic civilization.”

Musk, CEO of all three companies, announced plans for the Terafab in a livestream on X. As the name implies, the project’s ultimate goal is to produce a terawatt of computing power each year so that it can match the companies’ growing demand for chips. Musk explained during the livestream that he’s grateful to existing supply chain partners like Samsung, TSMC and Micron, but the current capacity of chip manufacturers only adds up to about two percent to what Tesla and SpaceX needs in terms of future computing power needs.

“We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips,” Musk said during the event. “And we need the chips so we’re going to build the Terafab.”

The Terafab project, estimated to cost at least $20 billion, will start with the Advanced Technology Fab in Austin, Texas, where Tesla is already headquartered. Musk said that the two types of chips will be produced in the Terafab: one for terrestrial purposes, like to power Full Self-Driving or Optimus robots, and another more high-powered, durable chip to be used in space. If you’re wondering what Musk has in store for space, the SpaceX CEO filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission to launch a million satellites to create an “orbital data center” earlier this year. As promising as this sounds, it’s worth noting that Musk has previously overpromised and underdelivered on other projects, like the Hyperloop, a $40,000 Cybertruck and fully autonomous driving.

AI coding company Cursor launched a new model this week called Composer 2, which it promoted as offering “frontier-level coding intelligence.” 

However, an X user posting under the name Fynn soon claimed that Composer 2 was “just Kimi 2.5” with additional reinforcement learning — Kimi 2.5 being an open source model recently released by Moonshot AI, a Chinese company backed by Alibaba and HongShan (formerly Sequoia China). 

As evidence, Fynn pointed to code that seemed to identify Kimi as the model.

“[A]t least rename the model ID,” they scoffed.

It was a surprising revelation, since Cursor is a well-funded U.S. startup that raised a $2.3 billion round last fall at a $29.3 billion valuation, and is reportedly exceeding $2 billion in annualized revenue. Also, the company didn’t mention anything about Moonshot AI or Kimi in its announcement.

However, Cursor’s vice president of developer education Lee Robinson soon acknowledged, “Yep, Composer 2 started from an open-source base!” But he said, “Only ~1/4 of the compute spent on the final model came from the base, the rest is from our training.” As a result, he said Composer 2’s performance on various benchmarks is “very different” from Kimi’s.

Robinson also insisted that Cursor’s use of Kimi was consistent with the terms of its license, a point the Kimi account on X repeated in a subsequent post congratulating Cursor, where it said Cursor used Kimi “as part of an authorized commercial partnership” with Fireworks AI.

“We are proud to see Kimi-k2.5 provide the foundation,” the Kimi account said. “Seeing our model integrated effectively through Cursor’s continued pretraining & high-compute RL training is the open model ecosystem we love to support.”

So why not acknowledge Kimi upfront? Beyond any potential embarrassment in not creating a model from scratch, building on top of a Chinese model might feel particularly fraught right now, with the so-called AI “arms race” often framed as an existential battle between United States and China. (See, for example, Silicon Valley’s apparent panic after Chinese company DeepSeek released a competitive model early last year.)

Cursor co-founder Aman Sanger acknowledged, “It was a miss to not mention the Kimi base in our blog from the start. We’ll fix that for the next model.”

A quieter week by headline standards, but one that reveals a great deal about where European venture capital is quietly concentrating: AI agents for physical industries, agritech automation, and the growing operator-to-VC pipeline.

What the week of 16-22 March delivered was something different in texture rather than volume: smaller rounds, more specific theses, and a pattern of investment that points more clearly at where European capital is actually building conviction. AI agents entering complex physical environments.

Agricultural automation that finally has the engineering to match its ambitions. A new generation of European VC funds drawing on operators who have scaled the continent’s own companies.

1. Upvest – $125M Series D | Berlin, Germany

Upvest has raised $125 million just a year after its last round, pushing its valuation to €640 million from €360 million.

The Berlin fintech powers the infrastructure behind investing apps used by clients including Revolut, N26, Openbank, and Zopa. Tencent’s backing also points to growing global interest in European fintech infrastructure.

2. Partech Impact Fund – €300M close | Paris, France

Partech has closed a €300 million impact fund aimed at one of Europe’s most persistent climate tech gaps: growth capital.

The Paris-based firm will back around 15 B2B companies with more than €10 million in revenue across sectors such as clean manufacturing, sustainable agriculture, green construction, mobility, and digital health. Its first investment is Luxembourg-based SustainCERT.

What makes the fund stand out is its structure. Partech has linked carried interest to impact performance, not only financial returns, and registered the vehicle as an Article 9 fund under EU sustainable finance rules.

3. Montis VC – €50M first close | Warsaw, Poland

Montis VC has reached a €50 million first close for a new fund focused on European startups in energy transition, industrial tech, and AI. Backers include the European Investment Fund, Poland’s Development Fund, and family offices from across Central and Eastern Europe.

The fund plans to invest €0.5 million to €2 million in 20 to 25 pre-seed and seed-stage companies, with half the capital reserved for follow-ons. Its launch also reflects a broader trend, as CEE investors push deeper into climate and industrial deep tech with support from both public and private capital.

4. Parallel – €20M Series A | Paris, France

Parallel, a Paris-based startup building AI agents for hospital billing and medical coding, has raised a $20 million Series A led by Index Ventures, less than a year after its seed round.

The company focuses on the French public hospital system, using AI to navigate legacy software without deep integrations. Parallel says that approach can cut deployment times dramatically and could eventually expand into broader hospital workflows.

5. Rivia – €13M close | Zurich, Switzerland

Rivia, a Zurich-based startup building AI for clinical trial operations, has raised €13 million to expand its agentic data platform.

The company says its system helps biotech teams unify fragmented trial data, surface insights, flag anomalies, and manage operational risks in regulated environments. The round follows a €3 million seed in 2024 and marks a bigger bet on AI tools that do more than store data.

6. Kupando – €10M Series A | Schönefeld, Germany

Kupando has added €10 million to its Series A, bringing the round to €23 million as it pushes its lead drug, KUP101, into a Phase 1b trial. The German biotech is developing an innate immunity therapy for advanced solid tumours and drug-resistant infections, a less crowded path in immunotherapy.

The funding suggests investors believe the science is finally ready to move from preclinical promise into patients.

7. eternal.ag – €8M seed | Cologne, Germany

Eternal.ag, a greenhouse robotics startup founded by former Honest AgTech co-founder Renji John, has raised €8 million. Based in Cologne and Bengaluru, the company is building autonomous harvesting systems for greenhouses, starting with tomatoes.

Its pitch rests on simulation-led development: robots are trained in virtual greenhouses using NVIDIA Isaac Sim before being deployed in real ones. Eternal.ag says this speeds up testing and iteration in one of agtech’s toughest automation problems.

8. Choice – €7.1M Series A | Prague, Czech

Choice, a Prague-founded restaurant tech startup, has raised $7.1 million in Series A funding to expand from Central and Eastern Europe into Western Europe, starting with Portugal.

The company offers an all-in-one platform for restaurants, covering ordering, payments, reservations, and delivery integrations, and says it now serves more than 7,000 paying customers across nine markets.

9. Ofiniti – $6.8M | Oslo, Norway

Ofiniti, an Oslo-based maritime fuel software startup spun out of DNV, has raised $6.8 million to expand beyond Singapore into major global bunkering hubs.

Its platform digitises fuel delivery paperwork, scheduling, and compliance, and the company says it processed more than 25,000 bunker operations in 2025 while capturing about 40% of Singapore’s digital bunkering market.

10. Reson8 – €5M pre-seed | Amsterdam, Netherlands

Reson8, an Amsterdam startup building speech AI for Europe’s linguistic complexity, has raised a €5 million pre-seed round led by Balderton Capital.

The company’s platform supports more than 20 European languages and adapts to industry jargon, accents, and speaking patterns without retraining. Its focus is on high-precision sectors such as healthcare, logistics, legal, and finance.

11. BBLeap – €5M | Rijen, Netherlands

BBLeap, a Dutch agritech startup focused on precision spraying, has raised €5 million in a round led by ESquare Capital, with backing from Yield Lab Europe and existing investors.

Its technology retrofits existing sprayers to control each nozzle individually and, with its LeapEye system, adjusts treatment in real time based on what crops actually need. The funding will support LeapEye’s commercial rollout and international expansion.

12. Homaio – €3.6M seed | Paris, France

Homaio, a Paris startup opening the carbon allowance market to retail investors, has raised €3.6 million in seed funding led by RAISE Ventures.

The company lets individuals buy securities physically backed by EU carbon permits and says it has drawn users from more than 30 countries since its public launch in September 2024. The new capital will help it expand beyond carbon allowances into broader energy transition markets.

13. Elea & Lili – €2.5M seed | Finland

Elea & Lili, a Finnish spinout from VTT, has raised €2.5 million in seed funding led by Lifeline Ventures to commercialise a cellulose-based alternative to the fossil-derived absorbents used in diapers and agriculture.

The company says its material matches conventional performance while being biodegradable and microplastic-free, though industrial-scale validation is still ahead.

14. Ringtime – €1.8M seed | Ghent, Belgium

Ringtime, a Ghent startup building AI agents for blue-collar recruitment, has raised €1.8 million in funding led by Volta Ventures.

Its platform automates candidate outreach, screening, and matching across 22 languages, targeting sectors such as logistics, retail, food processing, and construction. The company is led by Vincent Theeten, the former CEO of Belgian software firm Cheqroom.

15. eYou – €300K pre-seed | Bucharest, Romania

eYou, a Bucharest-based social media startup, has raised €300,000 in pre-seed funding from Fil Rouge Capital ahead of its planned May launch.

The platform aims to tackle misinformation and echo chambers with built-in AI fact-checking and tools that show users how recommendation systems profile them.

Positioned around GDPR compliance and European data sovereignty, eYou is pitching itself as a trust-first alternative to mainstream social media.

The week’s dominant investment theme was not frontier AI models or data-centre buildout, but AI agents entering physical and institutional environments where automation has historically struggled: hospital administration, greenhouse harvesting, farm spraying, blue-collar recruitment, and many more. 

Marshals, a new Yellowstone spinoff starring Luke Grimes as Kayce Dutton, is airing on CBS right now. You can also tune in with Paramount Plus. The Yellowstone sequel series sees Grimes as a former Navy SEAL who joins an elite unit of US Marshals to bring range justice to Montana, according to a synopsis from CBS.

The show includes Yellowstone actors Gil Birmingham as Thomas Rainwater, Mo Brings Plenty as Mo and Brecken Merrill as Tate. Spencer Hudnut is the showrunner of Marshals — formerly known as Y: Marshals — and Taylor Sheridan is an executive producer.

When to watch new Marshals episodes on Paramount Plus

Episode 4 of Marshals airs on CBS on Sunday, March 22. Viewing options for Paramount Plus customers vary by subscription tier. You can watch the episode live if you have Paramount Plus Premium, which includes your local CBS station. If you subscribe to Paramount Plus Essential, you can watch the installment on demand the following Monday, but not live on Sunday.

Here’s a release schedule for the next three episodes of Marshals.

• Episode 4, The Gathering Storm: Premieres on CBS/Paramount Plus Premium on March 22 at 8 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT/7 p.m. CT. Streams on Paramount Plus Essential on March 23.
• Episode 5, Lost Girls: Premieres on CBS/Paramount Plus Premium on March 29 at 8 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT/7 p.m. CT. Streams on Paramount Plus Essential on March 30.
• Episode 6, Out of the Shadows: Premieres on CBS/Paramount Plus Premium on April 5 at 8 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT/7 p.m. CT. Streams on Paramount Plus Essential on April 6.

You can also watch CBS and the fourth episode of Marshals without cable with a live TV streaming service like YouTube TV, Hulu Plus Live TV or the DirecTV MyNews skinny bundle. In addition to offering a lower-cost option, Paramount Plus lets you watch the other two Yellowstone spinoffs: the prequels 1883 and 1923.

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After a price increase in early 2026, the ad-supported Essential version runs $9 per month or $90 per year. The ad-free Premium version runs $14 per month or $140 per year. Paying more for Premium gives you downloads, the ability to watch more Showtime programming than Essential and access to your live, local CBS station.

Nvidia’s GTC conference had everything: trillion dollar sales projections, graphics technology that can yassify video games, grand declarations that every company needs an OpenClaw strategy, and even a robot version of the beloved snowman Olaf from Disney’s “Frozen.”

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I recapped CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote and debated what it means for Nvidia’s future. And yes, a big part of our discussion focused on poor Olaf, whose microphone had to be turned off when he started rambling.

Even if the demo had gone flawlessly, Sean might still have had some reservations, as he noted these presentations always focus on “the engineering challenges” and not the “really messy gray areas” on the social side.

“But what happens when a kid kicks Olaf over?” Sean asked. “And then every other kid who sees Olaf get kicked or knocked over has their whole trip to Disney ruined and it ruins the brand?”

Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.

Anthony: [CEO Jensen Huang] was basically saying that every company needs to have an OpenClaw strategy now. I think that is just a very grand statement that’s meant to be attention grabbing; I think it’s also interesting coming at this kind of transitional moment for OpenClaw. 

The founder has gone to OpenAI. So it’s now this open source project that potentially can flourish and evolve beyond its creator, or it could languish. If companies like Nvidia are investing a lot into it, then [it’s] more likely that it’ll continue to evolve. But it’ll be interesting to see a year from now, whether that looks like a prescient statement or everyone’s like, “Open what?”

Kirsten: In the case of Nvidia, it costs them nothing in the grand scheme of things to launch what they call NemoClaw, which is an open source project, which they built with the OpenClaw creator. But if they don’t do something, they have a lot to lose. So really that message to me, the way I translated it when Jensen was like, “Every enterprise needs to have an OpenClaw strategy,” it was, “Nvidia needs to have a solution or strategy for enterprises, because if it’s successful, it is another way or another pathway for Nvidia to be part of numerous other companies.” So doing nothing is a greater risk than doing something that doesn’t go anywhere.

Sean: The real question here is why have we not talked about what is clearly the end game for Nvidia, and the thing that is going to turn it into the first $100 trillion company, which is an Olaf robot.

Anthony: How could I forget?

Kirsten: Anthony, just go to the end of the two and a half hours to watch this.

So, the Olaf robot comes out, and this is something that Jensen loves to do. He loves to have these demos and some of them go better than others. It is also to demonstrate Nvidia’s technology in robotics, and I don’t know if Olaf was actually speaking in real time or if it was programmed — it felt a little programmed, or it had specific keywords that it used.

But the greatest part about it is that they had to cut its mic at the end because it just started rambling and speaking to the crowd. And then it went over to its little passageway and was slowly lowered. And you could see it on the video. It was still talking, but no mic.

Sean: Now we just need to give this little robot a wheelbase. And I know the perfect founder who can provide it. 

I mean, these demos are always silly. I don’t want to get up on my soapbox, because I know that we’ve talked about this a little bit earlier this week, but this was an impressive demo up until the moment where it fell a little bit short.

This is another really good example, though, of [how] robotics is a really interesting engineering problem and a really interesting physics problem and a really interesting integration problem, and all of this stuff, but this was presented as, in partnership with Disney, and it’s supposed to be the future of Disney parks and things like that: You’re going to be able to walk around and see Olaf from “Frozen” and take pictures of them and everything.

But these efforts never consider — or certainly don’t put front and center in events like this — all the other things you have to consider when you roll stuff out like this. There’s a really good YouTuber, Defunctland, that did a really good video about this — four hours long, not too long — about the history of Disney trying to get these kinds of robotics into their park, these automatons.

The engineering challenges are really interesting and it’s fun to see that history, but it always comes back to the same question of: Okay, but what happens when a kid kicks Olaf over? And then every other kid who sees Olaf get kicked or knocked over has their whole trip to Disney ruined and it ruins the brand?

There’s just so much on the social side of this. And that sounds silly, but this is the question that we’re kind of asking about humanoid robots, too. There’s so much hype about all this other stuff and we just don’t really hear as much conversation about the really messy gray areas on the social side of these things, and also just integrating them into people’s lives. We only ever really hear about the engineering challenges — which again, are really impressive.

Kirsten: I have a counterpoint and then we have to get to our next [topic]. This is a job creator, because Olaf will have to have a human babysitter in Disneyland, probably dressed up as Elsa or something else. You can imagine that actually, what we’re doing is creating jobs [with] this engineering experiment.

A new video (above) out of South Korea features the field tests and interaction capabilities of KAIST Humanoid v0.7, developed at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

The impressive humanoid robot was developed at KAIST’s Dynamic Robot Control & Design Laboratory (DRCD) and deploys actuators and other technology that was developed in-house.

In the video below, you can watch the bipedal bot walk, jog, and jump in an incredibly human-like way. It also shoots a soccer ball toward a goal (disappointingly there’s no robot goalkeeper there to challenge it), and performs a perfect moonwalk along astroturf. And it was the moonwalk that created a bit of a buzz in the comments accompanying the video.

“Moonwalk was flawless,” wrote one, while another commented, “Okay all of this was impressive, but you convinced me with the moonwalk.”

In its robotics work, KAIST deploys Physical AI, a form of AI technology that enables machines to understand and act in the physical world, helping to explain why robots such as the KAIST Humanoid v0.7 appear to move in such a human-like manner.

Instead of just “thinking in words” like typical AI, Physical AI gives machines a sense of space and timing in real environments.

Under KAIST’s broader collaborative intelligence initiative led by Young Jae Jang, the approach trains robots and systems to learn continuously through simulation and real time feedback, rather than relying only on enormous historical datasets.

Essentially, Physical AI merges brain and body by tightly integrating software intelligence with hardware such as motors and sensors so that the machines do not only compute, but also act, react, and collaborate in complex environments, whether as part of fully automated factories or in humanoid robots doing something like kicking a ball.

Engineers are refining the KAIST Humanoid v0.7 with the aim of enhancing its mobile and dexterous capabilities, thereby building on its existing walking and dynamic movement skills. By further integrating AI with mechanical hardware, it plans to get the robot to perform more complex tasks like carrying items or operating machinery, bringing Physical AI to real-world humanoid robot applications.

KAIST is one of South Korea’s top universities and is often compared to top global tech schools like MIT in the U.S. Founded in the early 1970s to drive Korea’s scientific and technological growth, KAIST focuses heavily on research in fields such as AI, robotics, physics, and engineering.