Lessons from a Laundry-Folding Robot

It’s a pretty familiar line: I don’t want AI to create my art, I want it to fold my laundry. This summer I lived that dream. Kind of.

During what I’ve been trying (and failing) to brand as “Bot Girl Summer,” a laundry-folding robot built by a startup called 7X Robotics moved into my basement and took over my Sunday night folding job. 

Usman Roshan, the founder of 7X, and his partner Yunzhe Xue have spent months training an autonomous robot with a singular focus: folding T-shirts. I stumbled across their project on social media, begged them to let me try it for the book, and they generously agreed to set up their contraption in my house for a few days. This isn’t some humanoid, it’s a lot simpler (and messier) than that. Two robotic arms they snagged for about $2,000 each, an HP Omen laptop with an Nvidia GPU running their custom AI model, a few cheap webcams, a work table, and a tangle of power strips. Boom! A laundry-folding robot.

See it in action in this quick video. Meanwhile, here are the biggest lessons I learned from my new roommate:

• It folds. The process is four steps: pick up shirt, drop, flatten, fold. The right arm reaches into the basket, plucks out a T-shirt, and drops it onto the table. Then both arms shuffle around together until they have figured how to lie the shirt flat. Finally, they execute the folding—slightly different than how I’d fold a T-shirt, but it’s liveable. 

  Yes, it only does T-shirts. Yes, you need a very large work table. And yes, the setup involves cameras and a nest of cords.

• It’s slow. It took the robot between two and three minutes to fold each shirt. Most of that time wasn’t the folding itself—it was the “flatten” step. That’s because laundry is a nightmare for robots, mainly because clothes are deformable objects.

  Every time a shirt dropped onto the table, it looked different to the AI model. The robot had to figure out: Is this the collar? A sleeve? Once it solved that puzzle and had a flattened, straight shirt, the actual folding was no problem. 

  “You read papers on machine and deep learning. Nobody's written papers on cloth recognition,” Roshan told me. “We're always trying to recognize cats, dogs, houses and other things.”

  

  A very sped-up GIF of the process—this one shirt took 2 minutes to fold.

   

   

• It’s still impressive. Even with all the setup baggage and the sluggish pace, it’s pretty remarkable to watch an autonomous robot stubbornly keep at folding shirts. What makes it even more impressive is that the model runs locally on a laptop, with only minimal hardware required. Plus, the robot had never been in my home. 

The startup is hoping to package this up and start selling it soon. No, it’s not ready for the mainstream consumer—far from it. It needs to get smaller, faster, and cheaper. And it really needs to sort socks. But that’s the story of every consumer technology. Other robotics companies like Figure and Lume have also been showing off their own laundry-folding demos. It’s all a big step toward that future where AI takes over the household jobs we’re more than happy to be fired from. Just don’t expect it to happen tomorrow.

• 📱 iPhone 17: Apple sent out invites this week to its “Awe Dropping” iPhone event on Tuesday, Sept. 9. We’re expecting an iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, and the all-new iPhone Air. For the first time in over a decade, I won’t be there in person. Got a book to finish. So I’ll be watching from home, right alongside the rest of you.

• 🗣️ Claude Browser: More proof of what I wrote a few weeks ago: the future of AI tools is our browsers. Anthropic is piloting a Claude for Chrome tool that will let Claude take over on webpages. My feeling is that we actually need distinct browsers—not extensions—for this to work best but I’m happy to be proven wrong. Hope to test it soon. 

• 🎧 Panama Playlists: Earlier this summer, a site called Panama Playlists went viral for scraping and publicly sharing the Spotify activity of high-profile figures—including JD Vance, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried and others. The New York Times featured the story this weekend, pointing out just how easily our listening habits can become… very public. And yes, yours truly made the Panama list. No embarrassment here. Everyone should get to enjoy the fine mix I made for my 40th birthday party.