01/04/2026: Maduro, Here Come the Humanoids, Alysa Liu

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1:09When you first heard that Maduro had been captured, what did you think? In a way, I wasn't shocked. I felt that the possibility of Delta Force showing up at 2 a.m. was very real. Nicolas Maduro faces drug-related charges in the U.S., and this DEA agent was at the center of the investigation. What was the most significant evidence against Maduro? It's a state-sponsored drug trafficking organization, so it's a massive conspiracy. At Hyundai's sprawling auto plant, more than 1 ,000 robots work alongside almost 1 ,500 humans. This may look like the factory of the future, but we found the future of the future in the parts warehouse, getting ready for work.

1:54Meet Atlas, a 5 '9", 200-pound AI-powered humanoid. I just can't believe what my eyes are seeing.

2:07After becoming the youngest U.S. women's figure skating champion at age 13, Alyssa Liu shocked the skating world when she quit a few years later. Now Alyssa is back and a favorite to win gold at the Winter Olympics. That was really pretty. I don't even know what to say. That was really pretty. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. Those stories and in our last minute, astronaut Sonny Williams with the reflection on America from high above, tonight on 60 Minutes.

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4:32And with seven terrain modes and a choice of powerful engines, including a plug-in hybrid with an estimated range of 53 miles, the Range Rover Sport balances raw power with refinement. Dynamic, agile, and truly instinctive, it reflects a confident, intentional way of driving and living. Build your Range Rover Sport at rangerover.com slash US slash sport. Perhaps no American official has spent more time face-to-face with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro than Roger Carstens. Carstens was America's top hostage negotiator in the Trump and Biden administrations. He freed a total of 65 Americans, unjustly held, in countries including Russia, Iran, and Maduro's Venezuela.

5:22Yesterday, U.S. forces captured the Venezuelan dictator and his wife. Both are in jail in New York tonight, awaiting trial on drug trafficking charges. Over the years, Roger Carstens convinced Maduro to release 20 American hostages. And in that time, Carstens got to know the man who is at the center of U.S. foreign policy tonight. The administration would paint Maduro as a bloodthirsty drug dealer. Is that the man you knew? I don't think so. And yet, let me answer that by this way. On one way, I could say I'm not naive to the crimes that were committed by the regime writ large. And if you're the president of a country, you of course have responsibility for what's happening happening in your government.

6:14On the flip side, I would say that being the person in the room with President Maduro, my job was to get Americans back, and that's best done by building a very human relationship. In doing so, I didn't find him to be a bloodthirsty maniac. I found him to be a practical person, someone who wanted to find ways to solve the problems that were faced by his country. When you first heard that Maduro had been captured, what did you think? In a way, I wasn't shocked. I think probably as early as August or September, in watching the different military moves and the diplomatic moves take place, it seemed that unless he were willing to make some sort of deal or accommodation with the United States, I felt that the possibility of Delta Force showing up at 2 a.m.

7:01was very real. Do you believe that the Maduro that you met was an international drug dealer? From all the information that I've received, I would say no. I think the country clearly touched drugs. And there's information. I always have to be very clear that I might see certain amounts of information and there's always a treasure trove of information that I've never seen or never will see due to classification or compartmentalization. But what I witnessed was not someone who was necessarily hardcore in the drug business. And I'll be interested to see and how the prosecution goes about proving their case.

7:3663-year-old Nicolas Maduro was in power 12 years. In 2024, he lost his re-election bid, but remained in power and forced the winner into exile. Maduro ruled Venezuela's 28 million people as an autocrat, imprisoning his opposition and leaving the economy of an oil-rich nation in shambles. Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice revealed an indictment of Maduro, accusing him in a so-called narco-terrorism conspiracy. These investigations aren't easy. They can be stressful and they can take up a lot of time, this one 10 plus years. One of the investigators at the center of the case was Sandy Gonzalez.

8:24He served 25 years in the Drug Enforcement Administration, part of that in Venezuela, and investigating Maduro. Close to 20 years ago, DEA, the Special Operations Division, started looking at high-level drug trafficking in Venezuela. And it eventually led to high-ranking military, police officials in Venezuela, and ultimately government officials. And Maduro was among them? Yes. What was the most significant evidence against Maduro? It's a state-sponsored drug trafficking organization, so it's a massive conspiracy. And what I mean by that is not everybody is going to be holding the kilos of cocaine.

9:06But in a conspiracy, you link everybody together. That's part of the chain. Maduro was part of that chain, first as a minister of foreign affairs and then later as a president. So when you're the president of a country and you are giving the green light to engage in this activity and you're putting people in critical positions in governors, ministers, heads of agencies, and allowing them to carry out these drug trafficking activities, you're just as guilty as the person making the drugs and transporting the drugs. But is it a matter of Maduro simply looking the other way, or was he enriching himself from the drug trade?

9:41I believe the evidence is going to show he was enriching himself. It was much more than just looking the other way. There was direct involvement. With Maduro now gone, what in your view changes? So it was a great step, but Maduro isn't the only person in that government that was involved in drug trafficking. There are still several DEA fugitives in Venezuela in positions in that government. The jobs just started. Maduro may be gone, but the drug conspiracy remains. Yes. Also remaining in Venezuela are a few Americans reportedly held in prisons who were not rescued Saturday morning. Former hostage negotiator Roger Carstens told us that Maduro held and tortured Americans who had been arrested for minor offenses.

10:30You know, everyone had a different story, but the bottom line is that they were arrested for something in Venezuela, and within a few days they were eventually sent to the intelligence or the military prisons in Caracas. Once in prison, then they were used as leverage by President Maduro in negotiations with the United States. But I can say, to my mind and my knowledge and having read all the intelligence, there did not seem to be a concerted program to go find Americans to use them as leverage. It's just that whenever an American was arrested, they would end up being used as leverage. What did Maduro want in exchange?

11:05You know, I think initially I wasn't sure that he knew what he wanted. But eventually meeting with President Maduro and discussing what it is that he might want, he settled on person-to-person swaps. There were a few people in U.S. prisons that he wanted to have returned, and that's what we ended up settling on over time. How many Americans are still held there? You know, I don't have the numbers exactly anymore because I'm no longer in the government. But as I understand it, four or five. in your view should they have been rescued during this military operation? I think I would have loved to have seen that.

11:39I imagine the challenges of conducting a military hostage raid are significant. The advantage of doing it the other night when we eventually went to get Maduro is that you've already eradicated the air defense capabilities of the Venezuelan military. You've challenged their command and control architecture. So adding on an additional mission of trying to get some hostages out, that might have been doable. But where are they? So since we may not know where all of them are, you could find yourself having to hit two, three, or four objectives. And now you're taking it to a level of complexity that might have been too much for that night.

12:16It might have been just enough to get President Maduro and then after the fact work on trying to get the release of these remaining Americans. To release any remaining Americans and run Venezuela, the administration is speaking to Maduro's same government, now headed by Maduro's loyal Vice President, Delcy Rodriguez. The U.S. did not leave troops on the ground, and Venezuela's repressive military, intelligence, and police units are still in place. Yesterday, the President said this about Venezuela's near future. We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.

13:02Democrats, including Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, are asking what's next. Yesterday, the president said, quote, we're not afraid of boots on the ground. I think right now we run the risk of Venezuela falling into some form of chaos. I mean, who's going to run the country? Is it Delce Rodriguez? Is it Maduro? handpicked person? Or is it a democratically elected leader? We should be on the side of democracy. I mean, we're the good guys here. Kelly serves on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees. Isn't removing Maduro good for U.S. national security? I think having Maduro out of the country, now in New York, being prosecuted for his crimes is a positive thing.

13:50The big question is just what comes next and who winds up in charge in Venezuela. They weren't thinking ahead here. Now they say they're going to run the country. What does that actually mean? I think this president needs to do a much better job articulating to the American people what is the plan going forward here. And then explain to the American people, what is this really about? Is it about law enforcement? Is it about drug smuggling into the United States? Is it about regime change? Or is it about what the president said 20 times yesterday? This is about extracting mineral rights, oil, from a foreign nation.

14:32He hasn't made that clear. Yesterday, the president said it was about drugs. The illegitimate dictator Maduro was the kingpin of a vast criminal network responsible for trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States. As alleged in the indictment, he personally oversaw the vicious cartel known as Cartel de la Solis, which flooded our nation with lethal poison responsible for the deaths of countless Americans, the many, many Americans, hundreds of thousands over the years of Americans died because of him. In an interview today, President Trump threatened Venezuelan Vice President Rodriguez with what he called a fate worse than Maduro's if she didn't cooperate with the United States.

15:26Roger Carstens has negotiated extensively with the Venezuelan Vice President. The Venezuelan Vice President is now in charge. Her brother is the head of the National Assembly. Are these people that the United States can work with? When you take a look at Delce Rodriguez, she's a lawyer, lots of international experience, hardcore technocrat. And I would say in my meetings with her, I found her to be pragmatic and rational and reasonable. But the vice president has said that she wants Maduro back, wants to have nothing to do with the United States going forward. I have to wonder, is she playing to a domestic audience?

16:06Is she playing to an audience made up of the military and the intelligence community of Venezuela? I'm not sure. But what I do know is everyone's essentially going to and eventually going to have to deal with the cards that have been laid on the table. And her cards are going to be pretty tough in that the United States right now, to my mind, has the upper hand and she'll have to have some sort of accommodation. You've known the Venezuelan vice president for a long time. I wonder if you've sent her a message since all this happened. You know, I did pass a message off to her and her brother. And the message was simply like, look, if you can find a way, work towards cooperating with the United States.

16:40And I think my fear is that if the current people in charge really dig in hard, then the United States, having already eradicated Venezuela's air defense capability and shown an ability to degrade their communications modes and their command control structures, that it'd probably be very easy for the United States to, you know, rearm, re-up, and then go right back in to grab people. Probably be a harder legal case to make to do such a thing. But I think the right move for everyone is to just start to work together. And so the message I passed was one of simply saying, this is a time for trying to solve problems.

17:16And please be willing and open to working with the U.S.

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18:23Start filing today in the Credit Karma app. For decades, engineers have been trying to create robots that look and act human. Now, rapid advances in artificial intelligence are taking humanoids from the lab to the factory floor. As fears grow that AI will displace workers, a global race is underway to develop human-like robots able to do human jobs. Competitors include Tesla, startups backed by Amazon and NVIDIA, and state-supported Chinese companies. Boston Dynamics is a frontrunner. The Massachusetts company, valued at more than a billion dollars, is hard at work on a humanoid it calls Atlas.

19:09South Korean carmaker Hyundai holds an 88 % stake in the robot maker. We were invited to see the first real-world test of Atlas at Hyundai's new factory near Savannah, Georgia. There, we got a glimpse of a humanoid future that's coming faster than you might think.

19:31Hyundai's sprawling auto plant is about as cutting-edge as it gets. More than 1 ,000 robots work alongside almost 1 ,500 humans, hoisting, stamping, and welding in robotic unison. This may look like the factory of the future, but we found the future of the future in the parts warehouse, tucked away in the back corner, getting ready for work. Meet Atlas, a 5 '9", 200-pound AI-powered humanoid created by Boston Dynamics. The rise of the robots is science fiction no more. I have to say, every time I see it, I just can't believe what my eyes are seeing. Is this the first time Atlas has been out of the lab?

20:20This is the first time Atlas has been out of the lab doing real work. Zach Joukowsky heads Atlas Development. He has two mechanical engineering degrees from MIT and a mission to turn the robot into a productive worker on the factory floor. We watched as Atlas practiced sorting roof racks for the assembly line without human help. So he is working autonomously. Correct. You're down here to see how Atlas works in the field. Yep. And you'll be showing Atlas off to your bosses at Hyundai? Yeah. You feel like a proud papa? I feel like a nervous engineer. Tchaikovsky has been preparing for this moment for a year.

21:09We first met him and Atlas a month earlier at Boston Dynamics headquarters just outside the city, where he and his team were teaching Atlas skills needed to work at Hyundai. And Atlas, with its AI brain, was gaining knowledge through experience. In other words, it seemed to be learning. You know how crazy that sounds? Yeah, a little bit. And I think a lot of our roboticists would have thought that was pretty crazy five, six years ago. When 60 Minutes last visited Boston Dynamics in 2021, Atlas was a bulky hydraulic robot that could run and jump. Back then, Atlas relied on algorithms written by engineers.

21:56When we dropped in again this past fall, we saw a new generation Atlas with a sleek, all-electric body and an AI brain powered by NVIDIA's advanced microchips, making Atlas smart enough to pull off hard-to-believe feats autonomously. We saw Atlas skip and run with ease. Do you ever stop thinking, gee whiz? I remain extremely excited about where we are in the history of robotics, but we see that there's so much more that we can do as well. Scott Kindersma is head of robotics research, a job he proudly wears on his sleeve. You even have on a robot shirt. Well, once I saw that this shirt existed, there was no way I wasn't buying it.

22:45He told us robots today have learned to master moves that until recently were considered a step too far for a machine. And a lot of this has to do with how we're going about programming these robots now, where it's more about teaching and demonstrations and machine learning than manual programming. So this humanoid, this mechanical human, can actually learn? Yes, and we found that that's actually one of the most effective ways to program robots like that. Atlas learns in different ways. In supervised learning, machine learning scientist Kevin Bergman, wearing a virtual reality headset, takes direct control of the humanoid, guiding its hands and arms move by move through each task until Atlas gets it.

23:37If that teleoperator can perform the task that we want the robot to do, and do it multiple times, that generates data that we can use to train the robot's AI models to then later do that task autonomously. Kindersma used me to demonstrate another way Atlas learns. That very stylish suit that you're wearing is actually going to capture all of your body motion to train Atlas to try to mimic exactly your motions. And so you're about to become a 200-pound metal robot. The calibration process is now complete. He asked me to pick an exercise. They captured the way I work as well. I am here at the AI lab at Boston Dynamics.

24:20All of my movements, my walking, my arm gestures, are being picked up by these sensors. Then engineers put my data into their machine learning process. Atlas's body is different from mine, so they had to teach it to match my movements virtually. More than 4 ,000 digital atlases trained for six hours in simulation. And they're all trying to do jumping jacks just like you. And as you can see, they're just starting to learn, so they're not very good at it. The simulation, he told us, added challenges for the avatars, like slippery floors, inclines, or stiff joints, and then homed in on what works best.

25:03And it can eventually get to a state where we have many copies of Atlas doing really good jumping jacks. They uploaded this new skill into the AI system that controls every Atlas robot. Once one is trained, they're all trained. So that's what you look like when you're exercising. Uh-huh. And what I look like doing my job. I am here at the AI lab at Boston Dynamics. All of my movements, my walking, my arm gestures are being picked up by these sensors. This is mind-blowing. Through the same processes, Atlas was taught to crawl, do cartwheels. It didn't fare as well with the duck walk.

25:52Oh, that was fun. And then this happens. And then this happens. We love when things like this happen, actually, because it's often an opportunity to understand something we didn't know about the system. What are some of the limitations you see now? I would say that most things that a person does in their daily lives, Atlas or other humanoids can't really do that yet. Like what? Well, just putting on clothes in the morning or pouring your cup of coffee and walking around the house with it. That's too difficult for Atlas? Yeah, I think there are no humanoids that do that nearly as well as a person would do that.

26:27But I think the thing that's really exciting now is we see a pathway to get there. A pathway provided by AI. What stands out in this atlas is its brain. NVIDIA chips, the ones that helped launch the AI revolution with ChatGPT, process the flood of collected data, moving this humanoid robot closer to something like common sense. So the analogy might be, if I was teaching a child how to do free throws in basketball, if I allow them to just explore and come up with their own solutions, and sometimes they can come up with a solution that I didn't anticipate. And that's true for these systems as well.

27:07Atlas can see its surroundings and is figuring out how the physical world works. So that someday you can put a robot like this in a factory and just explain to it what you would like it to do, and it has enough knowledge about how the world works that it has a good chance of doing it. There's a lot of excitement in the industry right now about the potential of building robots that are smart enough to really become general purpose. Robert Plater, the CEO of Boston Dynamics, spearheaded the company's humanoid development. He's been building toward this moment for more than 30 years. The cornerstone was this robotic dog, Spot, introduced almost a decade ago.