This robot will deliver your food, if it doesn’t get smashed first

THE food delivery robot was planted face down on a downtown Los Angeles sidewalk, its four wheels askew, when Jag Gonzalez came to its rescue.

Small, squat and controlled by artificial intelligence, the machine can do most tasks on its own – except stand up.

“It wasn’t my first one I’ve ever flipped over,” Gonzalez, 28, said. “I had been seeing this abuse so much.”

He sent the robot on its way and headed to a movie, where he told friends about the rescue. But three hours later, there it was again on a new corner: the same droid, taking a beating from the adidas-clad foot of a tottering pedestrian.

Gonzalez tried to stop the perpetrator. But the man crouched to look the robot straight in its LED eyes. “You suck,” he said – and delivered a final kick to its midsection.

In American cities big and small, legions of similar machines are carting around takeaway orders of sushi, pizza and White Castle chicken rings and testing the question of whether humans and robots can coexist.

Early signs are not promising. Throughout 2026, Americans have kicked, tipped and walloped the food robots – the most tangible incarnation of AI to reach their front steps.

Within the past year, a crowd in Los Angeles encircled and pounded a delivery robot; a man in Miami tried to hurl one off a bridge; another attacked one in the street; and in Sacramento, California, three men filmed themselves toppling and slamming a robot on the pavement, racking up nearly 2.5 million views on social media.

The caption? “Protecting the world from AI.”

Some attacks are vigilantism and some may be mere knuckleheadism, the thrill of attacking the defenceless.

Eunisses Hernandez, a Los Angeles City Council member whose district is swarmed by robots, said the trend has a clear message.

“Because of how heightened people’s senses are to corporations and to the advancement of AI technology, people feel like this is the closest they get to some of that other than online,” she said. “People feel left behind.”

Roughly 5,000 robots deliver across the US, mostly without incident, said Dan Ives, a partner and tech analyst at Yorkville Ives, an investment bank. Over the next three years, the number is expected to swell to 8,000, and analysts predict the industry will generate more than US$5 billion in the US, he added.

More than half a million robots could be operating worldwide by 2035, according to estimates from Transforma Insights, a research firm. And they could be delivering more than food as companies forge ahead with expansion plans.

Right now, the bots aren’t exactly cash cows. Serve Robotics, one of few publicly traded operators, lost more than US$100 million last year. It brought in US$2.7 million.

But Serve and other top companies are backed by such names as Nvidia, leader of the AI boom; Sam Altman, who helms OpenAI; Uber; and AI giant Nebius – tech heavyweights that have poured in hundreds of millions.

Through partnerships with DoorDash, Uber Eats and other food delivery platforms, companies are operating in at least 10 metro areas.

Using AI, the bots assess traffic and plan routes. They sidle up to restaurants, pop open insulated compartments and collect orders. Some can stash up to six large pizzas. A variety of buzzes – texts, calls, notifications – alerts customers to their arrival.

With bright white circles for eyes and human names emblazoned on their sides, Serve Robotics’ droids were designed to look innocuous, said Ali Kashani, the company’s CEO.

“Vandalism and societal acceptance were very top of mind,” he added.

But looks go only so far. Some freewheeling robots have become agents of chaos, blocking ambulances, clogging walkways, colliding with trucks and trains, and along the way igniting frenzied robophobia.

In Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia and more, the robots have faced vandalism this past year, according to police departments and encounters shared on social media.

Intentionally damaging property is a crime, but arrests are few and statistics recording the reign of terror are scant.

At the hands of a vandal, robots are helpless, unable to call authorities. That makes it difficult for police to track abuse, said Jasmine Reilly, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Police Department. “Unless people report it,” she said, “we won’t know anything about it.”

Several companies have human supervisors who watch from afar, aiding robots in their hour of need. A call to police is “very rare”, said Kashani of Serve. “We actually don’t want to be using police resources for this.”

Sometimes their assistance is unavoidable.

Hapless robots have wandered into peril on their own, falling down stairs, plowing through glass and going haywire on pavements. At least one collided with a self-driving car. Another breached an active fire zone.

The misadventures and misfortunes of delivery robots are well chronicled on social media – sometimes by abusers themselves.

Among the lowlights: a brutal, late-night pile-on in Los Angeles after last year’s World Series (with 700,000-plus views) and one humiliation in Philadelphia, where an oblivious bot rolled around with “destroy me plz” inked across what one might consider its forehead (garnering more than 3,000 likes).

The hope of online virality can motivate abuse, said Lindsay Ouellette, a psychology professor at LaSalle University in Philadelphia who studies human-robot relations. “We know that controversial content gets clicks.”

Those clicks come in part because robot abuse strikes a chord, tapping into “fear that people have around their jobs and AI taking over”, she added.

Robot couriers help restaurants cut labour costs by replacing delivery workers. But robotics companies note that they also create some jobs. Every 10 Coco Robotics droids generate one human engineering role, said Zach Rash, CEO of the Los Angeles-based company.

The robots benefit communities in other ways, he added. Coco’s bots scan pavements, sharing data with an app that helps visually impaired people avoid obstacles.

Robotics companies said they worked with local officials and pedestrian, biking and disability groups, among others, to ensure the machines rolled into cities smoothly.

But the robots’ ability to collect data is a flash point for some residents, who local officials said feel watched by machines that appeared suddenly, with little regulation.

In Glendale, California, a Los Angeles suburb, Mayor Ardashes Kassakhian said the robots’ arrival was “like something out of a sci-fi movie”.

In Chicago, they “emerged overnight”, said Daniel La Spata, an alderman in the city’s 1st Ward.

Kassakhian has proposed a pause on the roll-out; in La Spata’s ward, residents overwhelmingly voted to block robots from expanding onto more streets. Both officials say a slew of questions must be answered: Should robots be banned from high-foot-traffic areas? Are they displacing any human jobs?

In Los Angeles, Hernandez sponsored a motion passed by the City Council in 2025 that asks the Los Angeles Department of Transportation to examine the robots’ impact on pedestrians, accessibility and more and to suggest improvements.

“There’s a lot of people who are disgruntled,” she said. Hernandez believes they are “recognising what it is and vandalising it out of frustration”.

It doesn’t take much, in fact, for some to resort to violence. In a survey of college students, Prof Ouellette asked: What would it take for you to kick a delivery robot?

When offered US$100? One in five said they would consider aggression.

Battery and bedlam aside, the robots are, to many, already a fact of life – as normal as streetlights and the robotaxis stopped at them, said Gonzalez, the Los Angeles man who rescued, momentarily anyway, the delivery bot.

Walking through downtown Los Angeles, where the robots roam, he paused and said: “It’s the future.” NYTIMES