A new combat promotion called REK staged what it billed as the first sanctioned test of man against machine in a cage, and within weeks the California State Athletic Commission was asking pointed questions about whether anyone had asked permission first.
The September 18 event in San Francisco put a 6-foot-tall, steel-framed humanoid robot across from Frankie LaPenna, a 5-foot-5 social media personality with more than nine million YouTube followers built partly on footage of him taking physical punishment. The robot, piloted remotely through a virtual-reality rig, spent the night driving LaPenna into the canvas and the padded walls of the octagonal enclosure. He competed against three of the machines in total, got a few punches in and came away with a hand injury from connecting with one of the metal frames. The robots he managed to knock down simply popped back up, no worse for it. Roughly 100 people watched it happen live.
REK, short for Robot Entertainment Kombat, calls itself the humanoid robot combat league and runs on the slogan Real robots, real combat. Chief executive Cix Liv framed the whole experiment as a kind of controlled thrill ride.
“Our hope was to basically get some good shots without actually hurting Frankie,” he said.
The bigger ambition, as he describes it, is to pull the sensation of a cage contest away from the physical toll that comes with it.
“We’re going to democratize MMA so we can essentially experience the blood sport without anyone getting hurt,” Liv said.
The California State Athletic Commission did not see it as harmless spectacle. The agency, which oversees professional and amateur boxing, kickboxing and mixed martial arts in the state, sent REK a cease-and-desist letter after the fact, noting that any boxing or MMA contest, match or exhibition involving a human competitor in California requires its sign-off first. Running or taking part in an unlicensed version of such an event, the letter pointed out, counts as a misdemeanor. In a statement, the commission said it remains committed to protecting public safety and the integrity of combat sports.
“Unsanctioned activity puts the physical and financial well-being of all those involved at risk, and such activity will not be tolerated.”
Liv is not conceding the point. His reading of the statute hinges on a technicality: a robot, he argues, is not a person.
“The law clearly states that a ‘match’ is between two persons,” he said.
He suggested the commission’s authority simply doesn’t reach an event where only one side of the contest is human.
That gray area is exactly what drew Erik Magraken into the conversation. Magraken, managing partner at MacIsaac & Company and publisher of Combat Sports Law, has spent years tracking how state and tribal commissions govern combat sports across the country. He told NY times:
“Many athletic commissions will simply have no ability to shut down such events without amendment of their legislation or regulations,” Magraken said.
The commission itself seems to acknowledge the ground is shifting under the existing rules. Officials have indicated they’ll weigh new guidance as the underlying robotics keep advancing, rather than assume the current framework automatically covers whatever comes next.
Outside the legal question sits a more basic one: was this ever a fair matchup? Ken Goldberg, a professor who runs the automation lab at the University of California, Berkeley, doesn’t think so. He’s had hands-on experience with the size and heft involved. REK’s machines, he noted, can weigh several hundred pounds and are built from steel, which puts them in an entirely different category from a human opponent regardless of skill.
“It’s very unfair to put a human in with a heavily motorized system that’s only going to dominate,” Goldberg said of the mismatch.
Watching LaPenna get repeatedly put down, he added, tracked with what anyone would expect from that kind of size and power differential.
“There’s nothing surprising about that,” he said.
Goldberg has his own history with this particular form of entertainment. Last year, he sparred with a smaller robot outside of a cage setting for an educational demonstration, landing a strike that briefly got the better of the machine.
“I gave it one of my old kung fu side kicks from high school and it stumbled back and it tripped and fell,” he recalled.
The crowd reaction told him something about why these events resonate.
“It’s pretty scary,” he said of the broader appeal.
He tied it to something more primal in how people relate to machines, namely the fear and frustration with robots that many people feel, and described what he believes draws spectators in when a human gets the upper hand, if only for a moment.
“I mean, they love to see the human kick the robot’s gearbox,” he said.
He’s also clear-eyed about what happens when the machine isn’t stumbling.
“If you program that thing to just come swinging and punching at you, I don’t think you’ll get away from it,” Goldberg warned.
None of that seems to have deterred LaPenna, who reportedly pushed REK multiple times for the chance to get in against its robots before the promotion agreed. He signed a waiver absolving REK of responsibility even in the event of serious harm during the bout. The video of the bout became the most-viewed content REK has produced. Still, Liv said the promotion has no plans to run the human-versus-robot format again, with the company instead turning toward robot-on-robot contests, including a blade-equipped matchup it had scheduled for a Friday night return to San Francisco.
