Meta Built a Humanoid Robot Prototype Called Max for Research
Meta has built a humanoid robot prototype called Max with robotics firm Fourier, in a research project aimed at giving its Muse AI agent a physical body for household tasks.
The Meta Max humanoid robot is a prototype built by Meta in a research project developed with robotics company Fourier, according to a report by The Information published on October 31, 2026. The prototype was built in about three months, and Meta showed it to some employees at an internal robotics summit in late August. Max stands about 1.5 metres tall, weighs roughly 48 kilograms, runs on Nvidia’s Jetson Thor chip and has five-fingered hands, a face screen that mimics expressions and chest speakers. Work on a second prototype, called Max 2, began in September, with planned changes including sensors for stairs and a redesigned torso.
Meta describes the work as internal research and experimentation, with no plans to sell the robot and no launch date set. The company’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, has described a humanoid as a physical body for Muse, Meta’s personal AI agent, which launched on September 8, 2026 and reached 10 million users in the United States and Canada within six weeks. The idea is that an AI agent that can already help with planning, messages and information could one day also help with physical household tasks, if it had a body capable of moving, grasping and navigating a home. Max is a first step toward testing that idea in a lab, not a product for shops.
Meta Max humanoid robot and the road to household help
The Meta Max humanoid robot project shows how quickly humanoid research is moving, with a working prototype assembled in months rather than years. Meta sent its vice president of product for robotics, Li-Chen Miller, to Shanghai to work closely with Fourier on the hardware, while Meta focused on the software and AI systems. The details come from unnamed sources cited by The Information, and Meta has not released official images, a specification sheet or a price. The company confirmed the collaboration, describing it as research only. For now, Max remains a lab machine, and the questions that matter most are practical ones: whether a humanoid can handle real homes safely, whether it can learn tasks reliably and whether people actually want a robot helper in the house. Those answers will take far longer than three months to arrive.
Source: AI Agent Update
