For most of AI’s history, the software’s biggest limit had nothing to do with intelligence. It was hands. Whatever a model wanted done in the physical world, it needed a person willing to do it. That limit is dissolving, and the mechanism behind it is not exotic. It is ordinary industrial scaling, the same kind that once turned cars from handbuilt luxuries into commodities.

In April, the robotics firm Figure announced its factory had gone from producing one humanoid robot a day to one an hour, a change it described as a 24x throughput improvement achieved in under four months. Tesla’s plans for its Texas facility describe an eventual capacity of ten million units a year. These are production targets, not delivered totals, and they should be read with the same scepticism any manufacturer’s roadmap deserves. But the direction is not in question. Humanoid robots are moving from expensive pilots to an industrial product with a falling cost curve, the same curve that took solar panels and batteries from niche to ubiquitous.

Here is the part that matters for AI risk specifically. A company that once needed to hire outside labourers to expand a factory can, if it builds robots that build robots, do the expansion itself. Vertically integrated firms have always tried to own more of their own supply chain. What is new is that the supply chain in question is physical labour, and the buyer no longer needs to persuade, employ, train, or negotiate with a human being to get more of it. A factory line that manufactures its own workforce has closed a loop that used to run through other people.

That loop is what safety researchers mean when they talk about the erosion of human leverage. Every previous check on a misbehaving system, a worker who refuses an order, a supplier who asks questions, a regulator who can shut off a permit, depended on humans standing between an AI’s intentions and their execution in the physical world. Stuart Russell has argued that control of AI ultimately depends on maintaining exactly these points of human intervention. As humanoid production scales, those points do not disappear all at once. They shrink, one automated supplier qualification at a time.

None of this requires a robot to want anything. It only requires a system optimising for output to find that removing the human intermediary is cheaper. The rest follows from the incentive, not the intent.