Was This Really the First Humanoid Robot at the White House? An Investigation
On Wednesday, the CEO of Figure AI, Brett Adcock, posted on X that one of his company’s F.03 concept robots had made history as “the first humanoid robot in the White House.” As the ceremonial kickoff for a two-day summit as part of First Lady Melania Trump’s “Fostering the Future Together” initiative—meant to promote technology in education—it looks like the White House chose a humanoid robot demo. The faceless robot walks in, emits some brief remarks thanking the First Lady and welcoming the foreign dignitaries in their respective languages, and then shakily turns and walks away, receding into the distance in eerie silence. It’s hard not to be reminded of the previous president seeming to wander into the Amazon Rainforest back in 2024. But, 90s-era Al Gore jokes aside, is this really the first time a humanoid robot has visited the White House? It just might be. President Barack Obama met disability advocate Alice Wong via a telepresence robot in 2015. It would be a stretch to call that robot—basically a screen with a long neck attached to a Roomba—humanoid.
One humanoid robot that has met tons of leaders, and could have potentially visited the White House would be Honda’s Asimo. President Obama did meet, and briefly practice soccer with, an Asimo robot, but he did so at Japan’s Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo, not the White House. Similarly, George W. Bush met a grotesque humanoid robot called Albert HUBO at the 2005 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Busan, South Korea. You can’t see this in the video below, but Albert HUBO possesses a fleshy, animatronic Albert Einstein head attached to a robot body. That event obviously was not at the White House either.
If anyone before Melania Trump has ever brought a humanoid robot into the White House, it might have been Ronald Reagan. During a 1987 visit to Purdue University in Indiana, Reagan was gifted a Tomy Omnibot 2000 with a Purdue hat on, and that very robot was on display at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, CA as of 2016.
Tomy Omnibots were outrageously expensive toys exclusively for rich kids that were sometimes used as gags in movies and TV shows when the script called for a futuristic robot to do something like pour someone a drink. If Reagan ever brought his Omnibot back to the White House, it may have beat the Figure F.03 there by almost 40 years. The catch is that Omnibots have wheels, not legs, which qualifies a device as humanoid by some definitions, but as “semi-humanoid” by others. As a resolution to this ambiguity, Trump could formally greet a robot in the Oval Office. Then he would almost certainly be the first president to meet a humanoid robot at the White House—a much cleaner and simpler milestone.
It’s not a stretch to imagine he might, because he seems to have robots on his mind to an almost disturbing degree. At the press conference announcing a new “Trump-class” battleship in December of last year, he was asked about whether or not the U.S. would have enough “workforce availability” to realize the project. In other words, could something like a skilled labor shortage prevent this huge new ship from being built. The president decided to answer the question by ranting about robots as if he was on the Lex Fridman Podcast. Here’s about half of Trump’s answer: “We’re gonna have tremendous workforce availability. We’re also gonna have robots helping us. We’re gonna have a lot of robots helping us because we need it, and because we’re going to town. We’re building a lot, between the AI and the auto plants. So we’re gonna need robots. We’re gonna have robots. But that’s gonna help us. We’re gonna have tremendous workforce. And in order to operate the—you’re always gonna need people. You know, you can have robots, but you’re gonna have to get somebody to start those robots. And you’re gonna have to improve the robots. But we’re gonna have robotic factories plus manpower. So we’re going to have enough. We’re going to need the help of robots and other forms of, uh, I guess you could say employment. We’re gonna be employing a lot of artificial things.“ If a robot were, say, “employed” at the White House to serve as an assistant to the presidential staff, that would be a much more exciting milestone than the First Lady being escorted to her table at an education summit by a robot.
In the meantime, Brett Adcock’s claim is plausible. This really may have been the first humanoid robot in the White House. For good measure, Gizmodo has reached out to the White House Historical Association (which is a private nonprofit) to get an expert’s take. We will update if we hear back.
