New Chinese embodied model Maxwell tops global AI ranking on physical tasks - South China Morning Post

Developed by the CAS Institute of Artificial Intelligence for Industries, it scored 91.9 on the Meta-World benchmark – the highest recorded

Zhang Tongin BeijingPublished: 3:00pm, 1 Oct 2026Updated: 5:19pm, 1 Oct 2026A new embodied AI model known as Maxwell – developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Artificial Intelligence for Industries – has shot to first place on the Meta-World benchmark for robot physical tasks.Maxwell scored 91.9 – the highest ever recorded on the simulation benchmark.

Meta-World was set up by researchers from Stanford University, UC Berkeley and other institutions to evaluate how well robots perform 50 everyday physical tasks. They range from grasping and carrying to opening doors and using drawers.

The list draws submissions from leading teams worldwide, including Physical Intelligence, Google DeepMind, Alibaba, Meituan, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, the University of Cambridge and the Toyota Research Institute.

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