Moz1
Made by Spirit AI (千寻智能, Hangzhou)
Photo: Spirit AI (千寻智能, Hangzhou)
- dof note
- excluding the dexterous hand
- control model
- VLA Spirit v1 (vision-language-action), Spirit AI in-house; v1.5 open-sourced January 2026
- training data
- More than 200,000 hours of multimodal interaction data accumulated, with a company target of over 1 million hours during 2026; the fifth-generation wearable capture rig is reported to cut collection cost to roughly one-tenth of traditional methods.
- degrees of freedom
- 26
- joint architecture
- integrated force-controlled joints, industry-leading power density per Spirit AI
- load to weight ratio
- 1:1 (manufacturer)
Who's exposed
Jobs in the threat radius
- battery pack end-of-line tester
- electric vehicle battery QA technician
- high-voltage connector operator
- manufacturing inspection worker
- light assembly line operator
- chain coffee shop barista
- retail floor associate / in-store product demonstrator
Deployment status
Re-verified 13 September 2026: status unchanged at shipping, but the deployment footprint moved from the factory into retail and this entry is updated for it. The factory side stands: Moz1 is operationally deployed at CATL's Zhongzhou battery plant in Luoyang, Henan, which CATL describes as the first at-scale use of humanoid robots in industrial battery manufacturing. The units run end-of-line (EOL) and direct-current-resistance (DCR) testing, precisely mating high-voltage test plugs to finished packs, with reported performance above 99% connection success and roughly three times human throughput. Retail is new. On 19 March 2026 Spirit AI signed a strategic partnership with JD.com, integrating the Moz robot into JD MALL's smart-retail operations under an agreement covering 2026 through 2029 across consumer-product customization, technical cooperation and scenario deployment. In high-precision tasks such as automated coffee preparation the robot has reached stable real-world operation, and the deployment closed the loop between live data collection and model iteration in a commercial environment. Capital kept pace: two back-to-back rounds totaling nearly RMB 2B in February 2026, then a further RMB 1B on 7 April 2026 co-led by ShunWei Capital and YF Capital with Fortune Capital, Galaxy Yuanhui, Xin Ding Capital and Glacier Capital participating — three rounds and close to RMB 3B inside a single month. Spirit AI was founded in Hangzhou in February 2024 with Huawei Habo and JD.com among its backers; early reporting put its valuation past RMB 10B in early 2026, and while higher figures circulate in secondary coverage we found no citable primary source and do not publish one. In January 2026 the company open-sourced Spirit v1.5, claiming it outperforms Pi0.5.
When this hits the labor market
The end-of-line connector testing job at CATL Zhongzhou is already gone, which is observation rather than forecast. One to two years for replication across CATL's remaining footprint and to other tier-1 battery makers running the same EOL pattern (BYD, EVE, Gotion). Two to four years for light-industrial assembly work that is highly procedural with bounded part variety. The new variable this year is retail. The JD MALL line looks like marketing until you name what it replaces: in-store baristas and product demonstrators, jobs with far less wage elasticity than a production line. Note that the two sites are worth different things to Spirit AI. The factory delivers revenue; the mall delivers data, fed continuously to the model from a live environment, and the model is the asset this company is actually building. The question for the next 24 months is not whether Moz1 can do the work — CATL answered that in public — but whether Spirit AI can build the units, and how far the mall data pushes the next model.
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The humanoid that already clocks in at CATL
Most humanoid robots in 2026 are still demoing. Moz1 is one of the few that crossed into production.
The site is CATL’s Zhongzhou plant in Luoyang, Henan. The world’s largest EV battery maker put humanoid robots on an actual production line doing end-of-line testing on packs before they ship, and describes it publicly as the first at-scale humanoid deployment in battery manufacturing anywhere.
The work: mate a high-voltage test plug to each finished pack, run the test, log the result, disconnect. Procedural, repetitive, and unforgiving on precision — a misaligned connector damages the pack — with bounded part variety, usually one or two pack formats per line. Humans do it thousands of times a shift today. Reported figures put Moz1 above 99% connection success at roughly three times the throughput of the operator it replaces.
A second site this year: the mall
On 19 March 2026, Spirit AI signed a strategic partnership with JD.com and brought the Moz robot into JD MALL’s smart-retail operations, with the agreement running through 2029. The most concrete line in the public description: on high-precision tasks like automated coffee preparation, the robot has reached stable real-world operation.
The factory and the mall are worth different things to this company. The factory delivers revenue. The mall delivers data — real environment, real customers, real failures, fed continuously back into the model. Spirit AI has been unusually direct about that: more than 200,000 hours of multimodal interaction data accumulated, a target of over 1 million during 2026, a fifth-generation wearable capture rig at roughly a tenth the cost of traditional collection, and a data team scaled to around 1,000 people.
What Moz1 is
Twenty-six degrees of freedom excluding the hand, built around integrated force-controlled joints that Spirit AI claims lead the industry on power density, with a 1:1 load-to-weight ratio. It runs on the company’s in-house VLA model, Spirit v1, which is why it handles the long-horizon manipulation the CATL task demands: pick up the connector, align to a port on a moving pack, insert with force feedback, trigger, retract, log. Spirit v1.5 was open-sourced in January 2026 with a claim of beating Pi0.5.
The money moved in parallel. Two rounds totaling nearly RMB 2B in February, another RMB 1B on 7 April co-led by ShunWei and YF Capital — three rounds and close to RMB 3B in about a month.
Why we care for LostJobs
Moz1 remains the cleanest specimen of 2026: one humanoid, in a named factory, taking a named job. The job is battery-pack end-of-line connector test operator, a role that did not exist twenty years ago and now employs thousands across the global EV supply chain.
The mall changes the shape of the story. Factory displacement is something the market has braced for. A barista is not. That kind of work has been filed for years under “robots can’t get in here” — messy environment, varied motion, customer contact. The machine in JD MALL is quietly testing that assumption every day.
When one battery maker publishes the productivity data, the rest of the industry inherits the business case. Retail runs the same logic, only the arithmetic resolves faster: the cost of one machine, held against a store’s shift roster.