San Francisco's Tau Robotics cleans homes with humanoids — and uses the visits to train its robots
Invite-only visits cost $100 for one hour with two robots. Tau's privacy policy says recording your home to train AI models is a core part of the deal, not a side effect.
SAN FRANCISCO - Tau Robotics, a San Francisco startup, is booking invite-only cleanings with humanoid robots for apartments and offices. The pitch on its website is a familiar chore list: dusting, wiping surfaces, cleaning toilets, vacuuming and mopping. What the company's own service privacy policy adds is the other half of the deal: each visit records the home so Tau can train the AI models it hopes will someday clean without a human operator.
In plain terms, customers who let the robots in get a cleaning. Tau gets real-world training data from their kitchens, bathrooms and living rooms. The company says that exchange is why the service is priced the way it is, and that the recording is not optional.
What a visit looks like
Tau usually sends two humanoid robots per cleaning, according to its FAQ. A supervisor drops them off. The robots can use stairs and elevators. They bring supplies such as Mrs. Meyers multi-purpose cleaner and unscented Bona for floors, and will use a customer's preferred cleaners if asked. Customers may talk to the robots and leave special requests; the company says the robots can answer.
The machines are not fully autonomous. Tau says they are "operated by humans and AI," with a remote operator who can let the robot handle some tasks alone or take over steering. Vacuuming and mopping are among the tasks the company says can already run without constant human control. Customers do not have to be home; Tau needs access to the property. If children who need supervision will be present, an authorized adult must stay for the whole visit.
On Tau's booking page, a one-hour visit with two humanoids is listed at $100, paid at booking. Longer visits of two or three hours are offered. Bathrooms and bedrooms are off-limits by default and only included if the customer opts in. Spots are invite-code only; households without a code can join a waitlist.
The training exchange
Tau Robotics, Inc., is a Delaware corporation operating the service in San Francisco, its privacy policy says. During each cleaning, a trained human operator in another location steers the robot in real time and sees the home through cameras on the robot's head and wrists.
The company records that camera video for the whole visit, plus robot telemetry (joint positions, forces, balance, battery and other sensors), the operator's motion commands and their timing, and spatial data that maps room layout and object positions. Microphones are disabled: the robot can speak through a speaker, but cannot hear anyone in the home.
"To train our AI models. This is a core purpose, not a side effect," the privacy policy states. Recorded video, telemetry and operator commands become training data for the vision-language-action models Tau is building. "Our goal is a robot that performs the cleaning autonomously; the only way we know to get there is to learn from real work in real homes."
Operators are W-2 employees, background-checked and trained by Tau, working on-site at the company's San Francisco facility rather than from home or abroad, the policy says. Tau says it does not sell personal information. Video and telemetry are kept indefinitely unless the customer asks for deletion; even then, data already used to train a model cannot be pulled back out of that model's parameters.
Source: Tau Robotics; Service Privacy Policy (updated Oct. 24, 2026); Book a clean.