Steph Curry's tireless new shooting partner is an AI robot

Stephen Curry has a new teammate on the court, and this one never needs a timeout or a sip of Gatorade.

At the 2025 NBA All-Star Technology Summit in Salt Lake City, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver gave fans a sneak peek at three new AI-powered robots designed to assist players both during practice and inside the locker room. The Golden State Warriors are already integrating the trio into their training sessions, prompting Silver to call them the league’s latest All-Stars.

According to the league, the hardware was developed alongside players and coaching staff to bridge engineering and human performance.

Chasing rebounds and getting yelled at by Steve Kerr

The first machine in the lineup is the Automated Basketball Engine, or A.B.E. for short. In demo footage, A.B.E. serves as a high-speed shooting partner for Curry, tracking his positioning and chasing down rebounds so the star guard can maximize shot repetitions without interruption. Curry admitted the setup felt weird at first, but quickly realized the upside of working with a partner that literally never gets tired.

Next is M.I.M.I.C. (Motion and Intercept Modular-Interface Coordination). These bots act as running defensive and offensive dummies during scrimmages.

Head coach Steve Kerr pushes them as relentlessly as human players, even dropping expletives to clear them out when resetting a play. The NBA claims M.I.M.I.C. can read micro-movements, replicate genuine in-game pressure, and return actionable performance feedback faster than human trainers.

Off the court, the Kinematic Interface Tool, or K.I.T., handles player well-being. Spotted interacting with Draymond Green in the locker room, K.I.T. is programmed to hold conversations, play movies, and deliver motivational pep talks after grueling workouts.

Why it matters

Sports training has officially entered the embodied AI era. As Techspot pointed out, it was only about a quarter of a century ago that the NBA had to push just to get basic internet access into training facilities. Now, robotic dummies are running set plays.

We think the NBA’s execution here is notably smart because it avoids the trap of building a generic humanoid. Instead, each bot tackles a distinct bottleneck: infinite mechanical repetition for shooters, zero-fatigue physical defense for tactical drills, and low-friction downtime support.

That said, the real test is safety and emotional reality. Pitting multimillion-dollar athletes against moving machinery carries an obvious risk of collision injuries until safety systems are ironclad. And while having a bot talk to Draymond Green makes for great marketing, it is hard to imagine a machine replacing genuine locker room leadership.

Still, if the Warriors show tangible conditioning or shooting gains, expect the rest of the league to demand their own specialized basketball bots in short order.