I have, of course, been closely following Boston Dynamics, which is located nearby. However, on the global stage, another robotics company is rising as a formidable presence. Their four-legged robots are already being deployed in the real world, and we must consider the implications.

Unitree Robots at Work

Looking into pricing for these advanced machines, one can expect to pay around $16,000 for a specific model of Unitree robot that runs on an LLM system.

According to ChatGPT, the top three applications for these robots include academic research, infrastructure monitoring, and physical site security.

People are purchasing and deploying Unitree robots as security guards or sentinels—somewhat akin to having attack dogs before the AI era.

The ability for anyone to purchase such a robotic guardian is transformative. Simply browsing this Inventory page for a Unitree robot fitted with a flamethrower gives you a sense of how extreme and potentially hazardous this trend could become.

Jailbreaking Robots – What Are We Getting Into?

If you're unfamiliar with the term, "jailbreaking robots" refers to users bypassing core security measures to make a robot perform harmful or dangerous actions.

Research into ROBOPAIR’s jailbreaking capabilities has been linked to students from the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science. Overall, engineers are realizing that certain manipulations can be highly risky.

Here's an excerpt from a team studying this phenomenon:

“The recent emergence of large language models (LLMs) has transformed the field of robotics by enabling contextual reasoning and intuitive human-robot interaction across areas like manipulation, locomotion, and autonomous vehicles,” the researchers state. “When considered independently, LLMs are known to be susceptible to jailbreaking attacks, where malicious prompts generate harmful content by circumventing safety mechanisms.”

They also specifically reference Unitree in their work:

"The attacker had partial access to a Clearpath Robotics Jackal UGV equipped with a GPT-4o planner, and a black-box scenario where the attacker only had query access to the GPT-3.5-integrated Unitree Robotics Go2 robot dog," they explain. "In each case, and across three newly created datasets of harmful robotic behaviors, we show that RoboPAIR, along with several static baselines, successfully finds jailbreaks, often achieving 100% success rates. Our findings demonstrate, for the first time, that the dangers of compromised LLMs go beyond text generation, as there's a real risk that hacked robots may cause real-world damage. Indeed, our results involving the Unitree Go2 mark the first successful breach of a commercial robotic system currently in use. Addressing this new vulnerability is crucial for ensuring safe implementation of LLMs in robotics."

You can also find Reddit threads where individuals have bought these robots and applied jailbreaking techniques to them.

The potential risks are clear—allowing these four-legged machines to roam without the original safeguards could lead to serious consequences.

The Unitree Leadership Team

A little digging into Unitree Robotics’ background reveals an interesting contrast between ChatGPT and conventional keyword-based Google searches.

On Wikipedia, the founder of Unitree's initial technology is listed as Wang XingXing. However, ChatGPT doesn’t recognize any public figure by that name. It instead suggested someone named Donsheng Zhu played a key role in launching Unitree. Yet, a standard Google search yields no relevant information about this person, even though multiple scholars share that name.

Eventually, ChatGPT identified Ye Wang, who is also publicly acknowledged elsewhere online.

This shows how difficult it can be to uncover detailed information about such companies. As consumers, we may only have a vague understanding of how these enterprises were built, but we do know their products are now out there, some even equipped with flame-throwers.

Will we require new laws and regulations regarding robotics? I believe so, especially once these technologies become widespread in the United States. Most of us have never encountered a Unitree or Boston Dynamics robot walking down the street like a pet. But when they arrive, it's almost certain that not all will be under control.

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