Elon Musk doubled down on Tesla's embrace of artificial intelligence after a week of intensifying scrutiny of the advanced driver-assistance features sold by the electric-vehicle maker.

Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, said Tesla would build a robot in a human form that could perform repetitive tasks, with a prototype likely to be ready next year. It would draw on some of the technology Tesla has developed for vehicles, he said Thursday during an event in Palo Alto, California, around artificial intelligence, or technology designed to mimic the way humans think.