New foreign-made humanoid and four-legged robots now face US import limits, along with networked power inverters — with conditional clearance available from Homeland Security or the Department of War.
The FCC announced the curbs, saying a group of executive branch agencies convened by the White House had concluded that products of this kind carry risks to U.S. national security that cannot be accepted. The commission's own finding is that advanced robotic equipment made overseas could create weaknesses in supply chains and leave U.S. critical infrastructure exposed to cyberattack.
This is not an across-the-board prohibition. Advanced robots and power inverters clear the limits with conditional sign-off from either the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of War. Devices that buyers already own, and models that carry FCC equipment authorization, may still be sold, marketed and used; federal government purchases fall outside the restriction on new devices; and software updates for foreign-supplied robotic systems can still be cleared through a waiver. Standard Bots chief executive Evan Beard told The Robot Report that the inverter provision by itself covers only wirelessly accessible joints in mobile robots, and is aimed at grid cybersecurity rather than at industrial robots.
The commission maintains that its curb covering some mobile robots and power inverters singles out no particular country. Industry watchers read it as aimed at China, which holds upward of half the world's installed industrial robots and has accounted for 80% to 90% of humanoid robot shipments so far. Henrik Christensen, who holds the Qualcomm Chancellor's Chair in Robotic Systems at the University of California San Diego and wrote the Roadmap for U.S. Robotics, warned in comments carried by The Robot Report that the ban could reach considerably further than China, sweeping in robots from Canada and Europe, and called it very bad news for the industry as a whole.
One domestic manufacturer welcomed the action. Beard ranked the decision among the most forceful technology-security steps the United States has taken in the modern era, casting it as a message that the country has to lead and own robotics so that subsidized robots from abroad cannot unfairly take over U.S. robotics as he says they did with solar. He said his firm firmly backs the move and had argued for something like it during recent meetings with the White House and in testimony to Congress.
Others say the near-term burden falls on the American side. Georg Stieler, an international robotics advisor and STM's managing director for Asia, told The Robot Report that the measure may hold back physical AI innovation in the United States by cutting startups and researchers off from cheap Chinese platforms at a point when equivalent Western options have yet to appear, even as it opens room for suppliers in the U.S. and allied countries that can manufacture onshore or secure conditional clearance. Keeping foreign products out, he said, is a different matter from building an industrial base that can compete. Rueben Scriven, a senior research manager at Interact Analysis, said the likelier effect is a drag on the humanoid robotics business in the United States, since inexpensive Chinese humanoids have been introducing American buyers to the technology through marketing and entertainment applications, a benefit he said the policy could undercut.
Stieler's case in point, he told The Robot Report, is DJI. Despite years of curbs on Chinese drones, he said, the United States still lacks a consumer-drone maker able to compete at mass-market scale, and Skydio exited the consumer business in 2023.