Around 30 robots marched outside Poland’s Digital Affairs Ministry in Warsaw on Monday, waving flags and playing recorded chants demanding government regulation of AI and humanoid robots before the technology displaces significant numbers of workers. The protest was organized by Democratism, an initiative founded to launch public debate about how AI and robotization affect labor markets. Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski came out to meet organizers on site.
The robots used in the demonstration included bipedal humanoids – among them an Agibot A3, which fielded journalist questions directly – and quadruped machines produced by Delta Robots, a Polish company based in Opole that has been manufacturing humanoid and quadruped robots for more than a decade. The organizer of the protest, Grzegorz Kuliś, is president of Weegree, a 20-year-old recruitment firm also based in Opole – giving the demonstration a self-referential quality noted by several outlets: the robots warning about job losses were built by the industry sounding the alarm.
The Organizer’s Argument
Kuliś, who previously served two terms on Poland’s Labour Market Council and is now chief information officer of a robotics company, described the event as a first step toward informing public opinion about the pace of technological change. “We particularly want to address the issue of the potential replacement of people both by humanoid robots and by artificial intelligence in cognitive work,” he said. “If we don’t react now, we may soon have a problem.”
The use of functional humanoid and quadruped robots in the demonstration was intentional. “These robots can already move around freely, they’re already protesting,” Kuliś said, with the goal of making the technology’s current capability level visible to the public and policymakers rather than treating it as a future concern.
Kuliś said Democratism is intended to become an international movement, with a goal not of opposing robotics or technological development but of driving serious debate about its labor market consequences and policy responses.
The Government Response
Minister Gawkowski, who met with organizers outside the ministry, acknowledged the stakes. “Uncontrolled AI models, implemented into humanoids that will also keep evolving as robotisation moves forward, are a major problem,” he said. Gawkowski announced plans to establish a Commission for the Development and Security of Artificial Intelligence alongside regulatory sandboxes that would allow companies to test AI solutions before wider commercial deployment.
Poland signed the EU AI Act into national law in July, when President Karol Nawrocki enacted implementing legislation that created a national enforcement authority for existing EU AI regulations. Gawkowski told protesters that Poland is the first EU member state to introduce formal oversight of the AI market – a claim that positions the country as a regulatory leader within the bloc even as it grapples with the same labor displacement concerns the demonstration raised.
The Warsaw protest is the most visually striking staging of the AI regulation debate yet seen in Europe, and the irony embedded in its structure – a recruitment agency using humanoid robots to demand protection for human workers from humanoid robots – captures the contradictions at the center of a policy conversation that no government has yet resolved.
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