Unitree says its Superman humanoid hit 12.66 m/s, faster than Usain Bolt, two days before its IPO

A humanoid robot has, by its maker’s account, run faster than Usain Bolt ever has. The only stopwatch in the room belonged to the company that starts selling shares on Wednesday.

What Unitree claims

Unitree revealed the machine, which it calls Superman, on August 17, 2026 in a 30-second video. The claimed top speed is 12.66 meters per second, against the 12.42 m/s peak Bolt hit inside his 2009 world record. The claimed standing jump is two meters, against a human best of roughly 1.2 meters. The video’s own overlay puts the robot’s leg length at 0.85 meters.

At the first World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing in August 2025, Unitree’s fastest run on the track was 4.78 m/s. By its own account, the jump from that figure to 12.66 m/s came together in a little over three months.

The timing is not incidental. The Hangzhou company begins trading on Shanghai’s STAR Market on August 19 after raising 6.1 billion yuan, about $904 million.

A number is not a measurement

The gap worth noticing is not the one between the robot and Bolt. It is the one between a number and a measurement. Nothing in the video was timed by an independent body. The figures come from a company-produced clip rather than a scored event, and Unitree itself presents Superman as a demonstration of highly dynamic movement rather than a finished product.

None of that makes the run fake. A 0.85-meter leg and a claimed 12.66 m/s are the kind of specifics a company would not publish casually on the eve of an IPO, and the Beijing baseline of 4.78 m/s comes from a competition rather than a company video. But the only thing verified so far is that the video exists. Everything else is a claim awaiting a track, a timing system and a witness who does not work for the company.

What this means for the humanoid race

Unitree’s video marks a shift in how the humanoid robotics sector competes. A result set on the track at the Beijing games is one kind of number. A press-release record produced days before a listing is a different kind of artifact, aimed as much at investors as at engineers, and the rest of the sector now has an incentive to answer in kind.

The useful discipline is to keep two ledgers: what companies say their machines can do, and what has been measured by someone else. Superman’s 12.66 m/s sits in the first ledger for now. A record nobody was invited to measure is a marketing asset, and it will stay one until a neutral party holds the stopwatch.