San Francisco start-up Tau Robotics has opened a waitlist for its invite-only home-cleaning service, offering humanoid robots for $30 an hour. The catch, disclosed by cofounder and CEO Alexander Koch, is that the robots are not truly autonomous: each is jointly controlled by an AI policy and a human operator watching remotely, meaning customers are effectively paying for a person to observe their home while directing a machine to clean it.

Tau's website showcases three named robots—Chelsea (kitchens and bathrooms), Elon (learns where items belong and returns them) and Tony (deep cleaning)—built with cameras, claws and compute developed in-house but running on hardware from Chinese manufacturer Unitree, a supply arrangement complicated by a recent US ban on foreign robot imports. Operators, some Tau employees and some agency staff, currently work on-site at Tau's facility after background checks and training, though the firm plans to allow remote supervision later. Koch likens the approach to autonomous driving, with humans gradually stepping back as AI improves; footage from cleaning visits is used to train Tau's models and is stored indefinitely unless customers request deletion.