Elon Musk Says Tesla Robots Can Prevent Future Crime (www.newsweek.com)

At Tesla’s November shareholder meeting Elon Musk suggested that the company’s humanoid robot, Optimus, could one day “follow you around and stop you from committing crime,” calling it a “more humane form of containment” that might reduce the need for prisons. He showcased a prototype (first unveiled in 2022), danced with one onstage, and said robots at Tesla’s Palo Alto office already “walk around 24/7” and self-charge. Musk has touted Optimus — roughly human-sized at about 5'8" — as potentially Tesla’s biggest product, though public footage to date only shows basic factory tasks like sorting parts and folding clothes. For the AI/ML community, Musk’s remarks underline both ambition and huge technical and ethical gaps. Preventing crime would demand reliable human-behavior prediction, real-time intent inference, safe physical intervention strategies and robust safeguards against false positives, bias, surveillance creep and misuse — problems that touch ML generalization, interpretability, multi-agent trust and robot control. Independent reporting and analysts note Optimus remains in early testing, with limited autonomy evidence and unconfirmed timelines (Musk previously floated internal use by 2025 and broader production by 2026). The announcement therefore raises urgent research and policy questions about safety, accountability and governance as robotics moves from scripted tasks to socially consequential behaviors.