Thirty robots protest outside Poland’s digital ministry

About 30 robots stood outside Poland’s Ministry of Digital Affairs in Warsaw on 7 September and, through loudspeakers, called for rules on artificial intelligence. The machines waved flags, marched in a loop and played the lines “Defend workplaces,” “Time for rules” and “Don’t wait, regulate.” Organisers billed it as the first protest by humanoid robots.

The humans behind the event were Democratism, a campaign that says it wants a debate on how AI and robots change the labour market, and Delta Robots, a Warsaw firm that rents machines for shows. Grzegorz Kuliś, who speaks for both, told AFP the target was “the potential replacement of people both by humanoid robots and by artificial intelligence in cognitive work.” He added that the campaign “also has public relations value.”

One of the humanoids, an Agibot A3, told the same reporter that the robots were there “to show that this technology is already a reality.” The pack mixed bipedal units with dog-like quadrupeds. A website collecting signatures for the cause had 61 names when Notes from Poland checked. That is not a mass movement. It is a photograph.

Digital affairs minister Krzysztof Gawkowski came downstairs. He told the gathering that Poland was the first EU country to put the bloc’s AI Act into national law and that he plans a Commission for the Development and Security of Artificial Intelligence, plus regulatory sandboxes so firms can test systems before a full launch. President Karol Nawrocki signed the implementing bill in July.

The timing sits against a government that wants more AI, not less. Donald Tusk’s cabinet has treated adoption as a growth file. A World Bank range cited in local coverage puts a possible lift to real GDP at 1.3 to 12.1 percent by 2035, depending on how fast firms take the tools up. Kuliś used a different number: about 30 percent of Polish jobs indirectly exposed to AI, and nearly one million directly at risk. Those figures come from campaign arithmetic, not from a peer-reviewed labour study released with the protest.

The useful tension is not whether a robot can hold a placard. It is that the same capital is writing an AI-growth strategy and an AI-safety law in the same season, and that a rental company can put the contradiction on the pavement in an afternoon. Gawkowski’s sandboxes are a bet that firms will test before they fire. Kuliś’s slogan is a bet that they will not.

Poland’s labour market is tight in some trades and soft in others. A rule that slows a warehouse robot does nothing for a copywriter. A rule that slows a language model does nothing for a welder. The protest treated those jobs as one constituency. The ministry’s answer treated them as a regulatory file. Both moves are incomplete. Both are now on tape.

Delta Robots will book more events on the back of the pictures. Democratism will try to turn 61 signatures into a petition that a parliamentary committee has to answer. The ministry will point to the July statute and say the work has started. The robots will go back in the van.

What remains is a sentence the minister cannot unsay. He accepted the premise that the state should speak to a row of machines about human jobs. That is a small precedent. In a country that just wrote the EU Act into its own books, it is also a glimpse of how this argument will look on the next street: not a seminar, a stunt, and a minister on the steps.

Stunts age fast. A labour rule does not. If the promised commission writes a definition of high-risk automation that covers warehouse floors and newsrooms, the Warsaw photograph will have done a job beyond Delta Robots’ booking calendar. If the commission writes a pamphlet, the robots will have been a costume. Gawkowski now owns the follow-up, because he chose to answer them on the steps.