Ant Group’s Robbyant Teams Up with Leju to Bridge Embodied Intelligence and Real-World Applications

SHANGHAI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar 16, 2026--

Robbyant, an embodied AI company within Ant Group, today announced a strategic partnership with Leju Robot, a leading company focused on core robotic technologies. This partnership aims to drive innovation centered on embodiment, data, and models of robots, exploring the application and commercialization of embodied AI in real-world scenarios and accelerating the transformation of embodied AI robots from specific task execution to general intelligence.

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Under this partnership, the two companies will leverage Leju’s strengths in robotic embodiment, data, and use cases, combined with Robbyant’s expertise in embodied AI models, to cultivate a high-quality dataset of real-robot interactions. Meanwhile, they will join hands to conduct model training, optimization, iteration, and embodiment adaptation to continuously enhance the robot’s full-stack capabilities in perception, understanding, decision-making, execution, and learning. By focusing on industrial and commercial service applications, they also aim to build industry solutions and benchmark use cases, thereby accelerating the commercialization of embodied AI.

Zhu Xing, CEO of Robbyant, said: “The embodied AI industry is evolving from technical verification to real-world deployment. How to seamlessly integrate model capabilities, robotic embodiments, and practical use cases has become a key direction for industry development in the next stage. Through this partnership, we aim to advance the verification and application of related technologies in real-world scenarios and accelerate industrial progress.”

Previously, as a core data partner for Robbyant, Leju provided nearly 10,000 hours of high-quality, multimodal real-robot data for Robbyant’s LingBot-VLA model. LingBot-VLA, a vision-language-action (VLA) model, is designed to serve as a “universal brain” for real-world robotics, helping to reduce post-training costs and accelerate the path to scalable deployment. The model has been successfully adapted to robots from leading manufacturers, demonstrating strong cross-morphology transfer capabilities across diverse robot platforms.

In January, Robbyant released a suite of embodied AI models. Alongside LingBot-VLA, the suite includes

About Robbyant

Robbyant is an embodied intelligence company within Ant Group, dedicated to building the foundational platform for the embodied AI ecosystem. Robbyant focuses on the independent research and development of core foundational models, driving technological innovation for real-world use cases. By pioneering the boundaries of embodied intelligence, Robbyant is actively exploring the next-generation evolution of AI to accelerate the path toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

To learn more about Robbyant, please visit: www.robbyant.com

Zhu Xing (1st left), CEO of Robbyant, and Chang Lin (1st right), CEO of Leju Robot, witness the signing ceremony

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump says he’s nominating Fox News Channel contributor Nicole Saphier for surgeon general after Casey Means’ path forward stalled in the Senate over questions about her experience and her stance on vaccines.

In a social media post Thursday, the Republican president said Saphier is “a STAR physician who has spent her career guiding women facing breast cancer through their diagnosis and treatment.”

Senators of both major political parties grilled Means on her vaccine stance and other health topics during a tense confirmation hearing, deepening doubts about her ability to secure the votes she needs for the role.

Earlier Thursday, Trump on social media commended Means as “a strong MAHA Warrior,” also criticizing the “intransigence and political games” from GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who interrogated Means about vaccines during the hearing.

The withdrawal of Means' nomination to be the next U.S. surgeon general is a blow to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his movement, which championed Means for the role as the country’s top doctor despite her nontraditional path in medicine and some controversial past remarks on vaccines and other health topics.

The withdrawal comes after tense exchanges between Means and lawmakers of both parties threw into question whether she could secure enough votes to advance out of the Senate health committee. Her nomination had languished since her confirmation hearing in late February, even as activists from Kennedy’s Make America Great Again movement orchestrated a push to support her bid by surging phone calls to Republican senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, who had both indicated reservations with the pick.

In nominating Means last May, Trump sought to hire a close ally of Kennedy as the nation’s doctor. Means, a Stanford-education physician whose disillusionment with the healthcare system led to her career as an author and entrepreneur, promotes ideas popular with the MAHA movement, including that Americans are overmedicalized and that diet and lifestyle changes should be at the center of efforts to end widespread chronic disease.

FILE - Dr. Casey Means takes her seat at the start of a Senate Health, Education Labor and Pension Committee confirmation hearing for U.S. Surgeon General on Capitol Hill, Feb. 25, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner, File)

FILE - Dr. Casey Means testifies during a Senate Health, Education Labor and Pension Committee confirmation hearing for U.S. Surgeon General on Capitol Hill, Feb. 25, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner, File)

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters as he meets with NASA's Artemis II astronauts Victor Glover, Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman and Jeremy Hansen in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, April 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)