The crowd cheers the action during an Ultimate Fighting Bots match at Frontier Tower in San Francisco, on Aug 8, 2025. The AI boom has techies flocking to San Francisco, fueling a nightlife resurgence of suitably tech culture inspired events, like cage match boxing robots. — Minh Connors/The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO: Inside an underground boxing ring, a jab by a humanoid robot sent the other humanoid robot stumbling backward. The audience roared as the referee slapped the mat to count the knockout. In a rumbling voice, the announcer rallied the crowd to pump their fists and chant: “Robot fight club! Robot fight club!”
“It was honestly really surreal that this is happening in 2025,” said Jonathan Moon, 26, the CEO of Budbreak, a startup that builds robots to inspect vineyards, who attended fight night. “It felt like something that should be happening in like 2040.”
Some attendees were dressed in steampunk outfits, while others – likely coming straight from work – wore retro Microsoft Windows T-shirts. Fake US$100 bills littered the floor of the boxing ring as techno music blared and neon lights illuminated posters for flying autonomous cars.
It was just another Friday night in San Francisco. Since the artificial intelligence boom has electrified the region, it has fueled a resurgence in live events and culture. As people have flocked to the city, tech workers have sought out memorable experiences for a reprieve from their laptops.
There have been humanoid robot fights and events for making Taser knives that are later used in hand-to-hand combat. (The blade is rubber and wrapped in aluminum tape.) A performative male contest – a social media trend of men drinking matcha and wearing Labubus and tote bags – was recently held in San Francisco’s Alamo Square and judged by AI. And engineers have taken over bars to duel in AI-themed trivia nights.
Victor Pontis, a co-founder and CEO of Luma, an event-hosting platform, said that “a lot more people” have searched the site for activities in San Francisco over the past year. Nearly 2,000 live events were held in the city last month, including hackathons and group dinners, nearly double from a year ago, and the number of AI-focused events rose more than four times, to 578, according to Luma.
Many of the live events are not traditional networking gatherings. Techies said they were looking for community and ways to connect with people outside work. That’s what motivated Chris Miles, 38, a software engineer at Quadric, an AI chip startup, to attend a recent AI-themed trivia night.
“I’d like to go to more less serious things like this,” said Miles, who scours Luma for new events and wants to attend one every week.
Event organizers and party hosts said they were dealing with more demand than expected. At one trivia night, SignalFire, a venture capital firm, rented the Standard Deviant Brewing bar in the city’s Mission district. The venue, which is a few blocks from the office of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT and the sponsor of the event, was larger than a previous location after more than 600 people said they wanted to attend. Only about half of those interested were approved by the event’s organizers.
That night, no question was too nerdy for the crowd, who were predominantly software engineers. Questions included “what does this code output?”
If techies “only get one day and from 9pm to 11pm to go out and do something, they want to do something weird and special that feels like it could only happen in SF,” said Josh Constine, 40, a venture partner at SignalFire.
Steve Jang, a managing partner at Kindred Ventures, an investment firm, said San Francisco had always had booms and busts, with each bringing a wave of social activities that reflected the latest tech advancement.
Thirty years ago, during the dot-com boom, he said, his friends gathered to watch primitive robots fight in San Francisco’s Fort Mason neighbourhood. Now it was happening again, and “it just rhymes with everything that the city’s been about,” he said.
Back at the robot boxing ring, the crowd could not get enough of the humanoids, which were about the size of a third grader and possessed equivalent dexterity.
Vitaly Bulatov and his wife, Xenia Bulatov, started the Ultimate Fighting Bots event in July to bring people a “tech event that doesn’t suck”, he said. The couple runs the robotics floor at Frontier Tower, a 16-floor tech community in San Francisco’s Mid-Market neighborhood, where the smackdown took place.
The most recent fight, which was livestreamed, featured six robots from the Chinese companies Unitree Robotics and Booster Robotics that were provided by a Singapore-based robotics company, FrodoBots AI. Vitaly Bulatov said the humanoids, which his team custom programmed for fights, cost US$30,000 (RM126,270) to US$60,000 (RM252,540) each.
A ticket to the event – which was hard to come by – cost US$100 (RM420) and holders were able to bring a plus one. The sales went toward decorating the venue and paying those who put on the show, though the ultimate goal was to create a series of profitable sporting events, Xenia Bulatov said.
The robots, which were directed by people with video game controllers, had backstories, names, costumes and overbearing coaches played by actors. One humanoid, Googlord, was a Google intern wearing a multicolored pinwheel hat. Another named Peuter Steel – a play on investor Peter Thiel’s name – wore a “CEO” chain necklace and a black puffer vest.
In the final round, Peuter Steel fought a humanoid in a dress called Waifu.exe, a nod to the AI companion from Elon Musk’s xAI chatbot Grok.
“This is peak SF,” said Carter Crouch, 32, a former data analyst at Amazon who had traveled to San Francisco from Los Angeles for the fight.
The next robot boxing match is on Sept 27, the Bulatovs said. Even as there is fear of robots, Xenia Bulatov said, the humanoids elicited an emotional reaction and the organizers wanted to give people a place to have fun and foster “relationships in real life” through robots.
“We dress up these robots, and we make them look more human,” she said. “And we engage them in a very human activity that people just naturally have a tendency to connect to.” – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
