Robotics company 1X has unveiled new tendon-driven hands for its NEO humanoid with 25 degrees of freedom, built for near human-level dexterity, strength and reliability.
Once you have robots that are able to treat the world gently, you have the potential to change the world.
Above: the tendons are remarkable.
10 July 2026 – Yesterday NEO introduced 25 Degrees of Freedom – tendon-driven hands, nearing or surpassing human-level dexterity, strength, speed, and reliability. The main video they released:
A closer look at the tendons:
For seventy years, robotics worked around the hand problem. The humanoid bet is the reverse: it lives or dies at the fingertips.
Your fingers contain zero muscles. Every movement they make comes from muscles in your forearm pulling tendons through your wrist. Robotics spent 70 years ignoring that design. The company that finally copied it just showed a hand that lifts a 20-pound kettlebell and picks a grape off its stem without crushing it.
Here’s why every robot hand before this was effectively numb. I spent last night reading the NEO engineering specs.
Traditional designs put a motor at each joint with aggressive gearing, often 100-to-1 or 200-to-1. That gearing multiplies force on the way out, but it also swallows force on the way in. You command the hand to a position, it goes there, and no touch information ever makes it back to the motor. Strong, precise, and blind.
1X’s hand runs tendons at 5-to-1 to 15-to-1 ratios, with the motors sitting in the forearm, exactly where your flexor muscles live. At ratios that low, the joints are backdrivable: push a finger and it yields, then reports exactly how hard you pushed. Force flows out and information flows back through the same physical path. Every one of the 25 joints doubles as a sensor.
That’s also why it survives accidents. Slam it in a drawer or hit it with a hammer and the tendons give instead of the gears shattering. The failure mode of a stiff hand is a broken hand. The failure mode of a compliant one is a measurement.
A 200-to-1 gearbox makes a hand strong and numb. A 5-to-1 tendon makes it strong and sensitive. Evolution solved this first, which is why your hand’s muscles aren’t in your hand.
The human hand has around 27 degrees of freedom. This one has 25, is waterproof enough to wash itself, and 1X says finger assemblies are validated to millions of cycles with capacity for 10,000 hands this year. For seven decades, robots picked things up the way a crane does. This is the first one built to pick things up the way you do.
Those who were seeking to build humanoid robots had not spent nearly enough time studying human anatomy. The blueprint in terms of architecture and design, well honed over hundreds of millions of years, was there. Leonardo Da Vinci had shown them:
These hands are waterproof and food-safe, allowing NEO to wash its own hands like a human. The skin is co-designed with the sensors inside it and the tendons behind it. It is a functional material, not a cosmetic one. Because vision alone is insufficient for many tasks (especially with small, transparent, deformable, or occluded objects), this contact feedback is critical for adaptive, intelligent manipulation.
NEO built this in the U.S. in the most vertically integrated humanoid robot factory ever built in the West (China has several), and that strategy shows up here, too; every hand is built end-to-end in-house, from tendon materials and 1X Motors to soft polymers, skin and tactile sensing.
They have stated hundreds have already come off the line, with capacity for 10,000 hands this year.
We are living in very cool times.
As I noted at the beginning, once you have robots that are able to treat the world gently, you have the potential to change the world.