Meet the soccer-playing humanoid robot that just delivered the game ball at the Brazil v. Norway FIFA World Cup match

Before Brazil and Norway retook the pitch at New York/New Jersey Stadium for their Round of 16 match on Saturday, something happened at halftime that had never occurred in FIFA World Cup history. A five-foot humanoid robot walked pitchside, performed goal celebrations in the style of Harry Kane, Erling Haaland, Matheus Cunha, and Son Heung-min, then turned to the referee and handed over the match ball. The robot’s name is Atlas.

Built by Boston Dynamics, its appearance at the World Cup—in front of 80,000 people in the stadium and a global television audience—was a process five years in the making. “By placing Atlas at the heart of football’s most sacred ritual, we made a statement no commercial ever could,” Sungwon Jee, Hyundai Motor Company’s executive vice president and global chief marketing officer, told Fortune. Hyundai Motor Company, which owns Boston Dynamics, has sponsored FIFA for 27 years.

“The ball delivery,” Jee said, is “the moment Atlas enters public consciousness for the first time—the beginning of that journey toward becoming a partner that supports people in meaningful ways.” A robot that isn’t programmed but trained Atlas is a fifth-generation humanoid robot: fully electric, roughly human-sized, and designed from the ground up for what Boston Dynamics calls the most taxing industrial work. It has 56 degrees of freedom—meaning 56 independent points of articulation across its body—a 2.

3-meter reach, and can lift up to 110 pounds. It can swap its own batteries autonomously, so it doesn’t need to stop working when it runs low. But here’s where the soccer training comes in: Atlas isn’t programmed, but rather, is trained and learns how to act.

“It used to be programmed,” Alberto Rodriguez, Boston Dynamics’ director of robot behavior, told Fortune. “Now it’s no longer programmed—it’s learned,” he said, explaining how the robot operates closer to how LLMs learn than how a factory robot arm is programmed. A programmed robot executes a fixed sequence of inst