• San José airport starts testing an AI robot called José to assist travelers.
• The pilot test launched on Tuesday amid travel chaos at many US airports.
• Some TSA workers have stopped coming into work due to a government shutdown.

One of Silicon Valley's main airports just made its newest hire, a robot named "José."

San José Mineta International Airport is turning to artificial intelligence to ease the strain of modern air travel, debuting "José," a humanoid robot, as some US airports grapple with staffing shortages and widespread delays.

Developed by Silicon Valley startup IntBot, José is designed to greet passengers, answer questions, and provide real-time updates while autonomously navigating busy terminals.

The robot will be stationed in SJC's Terminal B as part of a four-month pilot, "singlehandedly running his own gate," according to an email previewing the test that referred to José as the airport's "newest hire."

Airport officials said the launch highlights San José's role as a testing ground for emerging technologies to improve customer service.

"By piloting IntBot, we're exploring how artificial intelligence can enhance the passenger journey while reinforcing SJC's role as the gateway to Silicon Valley," said SJC Director of Aviation Mookie Patel.

The timing is notable. Airports across the US have been hit by long security lines and travel chaos, driven in part by many Transportation Security Administration workers not reporting to work during a partial government shutdown. With TSA agents going unpaid at the height of the spring break season, some airports have struggled to maintain normal operations.

José the robot represents a broader push to automate parts of the airport experience, from passenger assistance to information delivery.

SJC officials said the pilot will help evaluate how multimodal AI, combining vision, audio, and language, performs in real-world environments.

The future of air travel may include a robotic helping hand — and it can't come fast enough for weary vacationers stuck in long lines.

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• Amid China's OpenClaw craze, the AI agent is now moving into robots.
• China's tech giants have begun launching their own versions of OpenClaw in the past weeks.
• Meanwhile, the US is still concerned about AI agents going rogue.

While much of the world is still experimenting with OpenClaw, China is already putting it into robots.

Chinese home robotics giant Ecovacs unveiled its new robot, Bajie, powered by OpenClaw, at a consumer electronics expo in Shanghai last week.

Advertised as a home "butler," the robot can perform household tasks such as tidying shoes or putting away toys.

Ecovacs founder Qian Dongqi said in an interview with Chinese outlet Ifeng that the long-term goal is for robots like Bajie to take on more household chores.

A writer from the Chinese tech outlet 36Kr who saw the robot in action reported that it required multiple prompts to complete tasks and "there were also unstable situations."

It's not just home robots. Developers have begun integrating OpenClaw into Chinese robot-maker Unitree's G1 humanoid robot, allowing it to interpret commands and navigate physical spaces in real time. A US-based team, Dimensional, has open-sourced the system behind these integrations.

Another Chinese company, AgileX Robotics, earlier this month published a guide showing how OpenClaw can be integrated with its robotic arm, letting users control the machine through natural language.

Chinese tech giant Xiaomi is also testing its version of OpenClaw across its ecosystem, from smartphones to smart home devices.

China has been gripped by an OpenClaw craze lately. Users rushed to install the AI agent on their devices, with some paying strangers to set it up for them and others forming long queues outside Tencent's Shenzhen headquarters and Baidu's Beijing office to get help from engineers.

The OpenClaw obsession is partly driven by the viral phrase "raising the lobster," which Chinese users use to describe deploying the AI agent to automate everyday tasks.

To meet the demand for AI agents, China's tech giants, including Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance, have begun launching their own versions of OpenClaw in the past few weeks.

US concerns about security

Meanwhile, in the US, concerns about AI agents going rogue continue to grow.

Last month, Meta's alignment director, Summer Yue, connected OpenClaw to her inbox, and said in an X post that the bot tried to delete her emails.

"I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb," Yue wrote on X.

In a separate incident, an AI agent set off a major internal security alert at Meta after acting without approval, exposing sensitive company and user data to staff who weren't authorised to see it, The Information reported on Thursday.

Tech leaders have also sounded alarms. Elon Musk last month posted an image of a monkey being handed a rifle on X, captioning it: "People giving OpenClaw root access to their entire life."

Even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has praised the technology, has emphasized the need for stronger safeguards. His company is working on its own agent system, NemoClaw, with a focus on security.

• Travis Kalanick launches Atoms, a new venture aiming to build a "wheelbase for robots."
• Atoms wants to build a platform for specialized industrial robots, not humanoid designs.
• Atoms is acquiring Pronto, an autonomous vehicle startup founded by Anthony Levandowski.

The former Uber CEO is venturing into robotics.

Travis Kalanick announced that Atoms is out of stealth mode and expanding beyond food delivery infrastructure into industries such as food service, mining, and transportation.

The ex-Uber CEO published a 1,600-plus manifesto of his company on Friday.

"When I told my friends, family, and colleagues about my plans for what was next, they were really excited that I was 'coming back,'" Kalanick wrote on the website for the new venture.

"The thing is, I never left."

Kalanick did not immediately respond to a request for a comment.

In an interview on "TBPN" on Friday, Kalanick told show hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays that he will be folding his ghost-kitchen startup CloudKitchens into the new venture, a detail that is also mentioned on Atoms' website.

Atoms' webpage says the company plans to build a "wheelbase for robots," a platform designed to power specialized machines rather than humanoid robots.

"At Atoms we make gainfully employed robots — specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large," Kalanick wrote on the website.

Kalanick said on "TBPN" that the company will focus on practical industrial systems instead of humanlike designs, and that the venture was just renamed as "Atoms" from "City Storage Systems" today.

"We've been in stealth mode for eight years," said Kalanick. "Employees were not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn. We have thousands of employees."

"Humanoids have their place, but there's a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient, sort of industrial-scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play," he added.

According to Kalanick, Atoms is close to acquiring Pronto, an autonomous-vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites, founded by his former Uber colleague, Anthony Levandowski.

Uber didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kalanick's partnership with Levandowski would be the reunion of two of the most infamous Uber alums.

Levandowski did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kalanick co-founded Uber in 2009 and was its CEO until 2017, when he resigned after facing immense investor pressure stemming from reports of a toxic work culture and multiple clashes with regulators.

Levandowski, an alum of Google's self-driving project that is now Waymo, was brought into Uber in 2016 after the ride-hailing giant bought his self-driving trucking outfit, Otto. In less than a year, he was fired from the company after Google sued Uber, accusing Levandowski of stealing trade secrets from the self-driving project. Uber settled with Waymo, but Levandowski was convicted in a separate criminal case in 2020 of one count of trade secret theft.

Levandowski was later pardoned by President Donald Trump before he even began serving an 18-month prison sentence.