Clone shows off an amazing robot hand it's already retiring. The new hand might be totally different.

This amazing robot hand is ... retiring

Most robotics companies show off their newest hardware. Clone just showed off a hand it's done with.

Okay. That's a flex.

The musculoskeletal android startup posted a 39-second teleoperation video yesterday of the hand from Torso 3, its bench-mounted upper-body platform. A human hand sits on one side of the frame, Clone's dark, gloved robot hand on the other, and the robot mirrors the human: fingers curling knuckle by knuckle, the palm cupping, the thumb opposing, and eventually the two of them pointing at each other like a Michelangelo ceiling.

It's pretty impressive. It looks pretty much state-of-the-art. The motion is soft and fluid in a way that motor-driven robot hands rarely manage, and the hand is both flexible and slim. (Important potential caveat: is it durable?)

The video has picked up over 200,000 views in a day.

Then came the follow-up post.

"The Hand of Torso 3 was made in April 2026 and marks the last of Clone's legacy Hand designs," the company says. "Over last 6 months, Clone has re-designed the entire system from the ground up, optimizing for simulatability and controllability without compromising on human-level capabilities."

I mean, that's almost punking the industry.

And then a second follow-up: "This re-design culminates in Torso 4 — launching in November — a human-level torso designed to automate any stationary bimanual task for enterprises."

So this is the old hand ... as amazing as it is. The new one is coming next month, built on what Clone describes as an entirely new system.

An entirely new system? No more Myofiber?

Two words in there are doing a lot of work. The first is "simulatability." Clone's whole bet has been Myofiber, its artificial muscle: a mesh sleeve around a bladder that contracts when pressurized, which the company says can shrink 30% in under 50 milliseconds. The company has called it the "most biomimetic hand ever created" and says it can move at "superhuman speeds," which would be very welcome in a space where robots are being criticized for slow, jerky movement. Hundreds of those muscles pull on a polymer skeleton modeled on human anatomy, driven by a 500-watt pump that plays the role of a heart. It's biomimetic, compliant, and quiet.

(Important note: the "learn more about Myofiber" page is currently empty, with a message saying "We are currently researching, page will be available soon." So ... will the new hand be built on a totally different infrastructure?)

The current hand is likely a nightmare to model. 

Soft hydraulic actuators are nonlinear, with fluid dynamics, friction, and material stretch all in play. And modern robot learning runs on simulation: train a policy across millions of virtual episodes, then transfer it to the real machine. A hand you can't simulate accurately is a hand you have to teach the slow way, which in practice means teleoperation. 

That's exactly what this video shows.

What might be happening here ... Clone rebuilding so its robots can be trained the way the rest of the industry trains them. What we don't know is how much of Myofiber survives the redesign. Clone hasn't said.

A new target vertical, too

The second notable phrase is "stationary bimanual task for enterprises."

That's a much narrower target than the synthetic-human pitch Clone is known for. At the Abundance Summit in March, CEO Dhanush Radhakrishnan laid out a roadmap to "Robo Butlers": a tool-using torso by late 2026, humanlike walking in 2027, hotel deployments in 2028, all at under $20,000 a unit. Torso 4 in November lines up with the first milestone. 

But pitching it at enterprise work cells with no legs in sight suggests Clone has figured out where the first dollars are.

That's smart. Stationary two-handed work like assembly, kitting, and lab handling is where dexterity pays off first, and nobody needs a robot to walk to a workbench it's bolted to. It also puts Clone closer to Sanctuary AI, which has bet on hydraulic hands for many of the same reasons.

Clone, which now has an office in Mountain View alongside its Polish roots, said in March that it was raising a $50 million round. It hasn't announced that it has closed.

Still, there's something almost cocky about retiring a hand most robotics companies would love to have, and announcing the replacement in a reply.

November is a month away. We'll see if the confidence is warranted.