The Terminator walked SF last night. A human was driving.

That six-foot figure clanking down a San Francisco sidewalk was an EngineAI T800 — a Shenzhen-built humanoid named, with zero subtlety, after the Terminator. It stands 1.7m, weighs 75kg, carries 29 degrees of freedom, and has joint modules that peak at 450 N·m. REK Robots, the SF startup that imported the first T800 into the US, has been taking its fleet out for public walks; earlier footage showed Unitree G1s clogging a crosswalk while onlookers cracked jokes about RC cars with legs.

The part the clips leave out: these strolls are teleoperated. A human is on the sticks. Nothing in the demo proves autonomous navigation in an unstructured city, which is still the hard, unsolved half of humanoid robotics — the hardware is arriving much faster than the brain. EngineAI began mass production in December 2025 at a 10,000-unit Shenzhen facility, with industrial units reported around $40,500.

REK's angle isn't warehouses or housework, it's combat sport: livestreamed cage matches, plus a permanent SF storefront where you can rent, buy, repair, or pilot a humanoid. Founder Cix, who has run robot fights in the city for about a year, pitches it as "making Real Steel a reality" and describes a T800 strike as getting hit by a motorized bat at 100 mph.

Why it matters: cheap Chinese humanoids are already walking American streets — the bottleneck is the pilot, not the platform.