So proud to see F.03 make history as the first humanoid robot in the White House 🤖 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/tXsxpEErsi
– Brett Adcock (@adcock_brett) 25 March 2026
As the formal start of the two-day summit as part of First Lady Melania Trump’s “Fostering the Future Together” initiative — which aims to promote technology in education — it looks like the White House has chosen to demo a humanoid robot. The faceless robot walks in, makes a few brief remarks thanking the First Lady and welcoming the foreign dignitaries in their respective languages, and then slowly turns and walks away, walking away into the eerie silence. It’s hard not to be reminded of the last president wandering into the Amazon rainforest in 2024.
But, aside from the ’90s Al Gore joke, is this really the first time a humanoid robot has visited the White House? It just might happen.
President Barack Obama meets with disability advocate Alice Wong via a telepresence robot in 2015. It would be a stretch to call that a robot – basically a long-necked screen attached to a Roomba –humanoid.
One humanoid robot that has met several leaders, and could potentially visit the White House, would be Honda’s Asimo. President Obama met the Asimo robot and briefly practiced soccer with it, but he did so not at the White House, but at Japan’s Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo.
Similarly, George W. Bush met a strange humanoid robot named Albert Hubo at the 2005 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Busan, South Korea. You can’t see it in the video below, but Albert Hubo has a fleshy, animatronic Albert Einstein head attached to the body of a robot. Apparently that program was not even in the White House.
If anyone has brought a humanoid robot to the White House before Melania Trump, it must have been Ronald Reagan. During a visit to Purdue University in Indiana in 1987, Reagan was gifted a Tommy Omnibot 2000 with a Purdue hat, and the same robot was on display at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, CA until 2016.
Tommy Omnibots were extremely expensive toys, especially for rich children, that were sometimes used as gags in movies and TV shows when the script called for a futuristic robot to do something like pour someone a drink. If Reagan ever brought his Omnibot back to the White House, it would leave Picture F.03 there by nearly 40 years. The problem is that omnibots have wheels, not legs, which qualifies a device as humanoid according to some definitions, but as “semi-humanoid” according to others.
As a solution to this ambiguity, Trump could formally welcome a robot into the Oval Office. then it will almost certainly be First President to meet humanoid robot in White House-A cleaner and simpler milestone.
It’s not a stretch to imagine him doing this, as he seems to have robots in his mind to an almost disturbing extent. At a press conference announcing a new “Trump-class” frigate in December last year, he was asked whether the US would have sufficient “workforce availability” to realize the project. In other words, could something like a shortage of skilled workers prevent this huge new ship from being built? The President decided to answer this question about robots as if he were on the Lex Friedman Podcast.
Here’s about half of Trump’s answer:
“We’ll have tremendous workforce availability. We’ll also have robots that will help us. We’ll have a lot of robots that will help us because we need it, and because we’re going to the city. We’re going to be building a lot between AI and auto plants. So we’re going to need robots. We’re going to have robots. But they’re going to help us. We’re going to have a tremendous workforce. And to do the work. You’re always going to need people. You know, you can have robots, but you have to have those robots to start with.” But we’ll have robotic factories and manpower, I guess you could say. employment. We’re going to be using a lot of synthetic things.”
If a robot were, say, “assigned” to work as an assistant on the President’s staff at the White House, it would be a far more exciting milestone than having the First Lady escorted to her table by a robot at an education summit.
Meanwhile, Brett Adcock’s claim is credible. This may actually be the first humanoid robot for the White House. For good measure, Gizmodo contacted the White House Historical Association (which is a private nonprofit) to get an expert opinion. We’ll update if we hear back.
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