US Just Blocked Foreign-Made Humanoid Robots, Here’s why

The United States has blocked new foreign-made humanoid robots from its market.

On the 28th of July, the FCC added two categories to its Covered List: foreign produced power inverters, and advanced robotic devices — humanoids, quadrupeds and autonomous mobile robots.

That means no FCC authorisation — the approval needed to import, market or sell a device here. Models already approved are untouched.

It’s written by place of production, not by company — but the evidence behind it is mostly about China.

It cites an exploit that could chain Unitree humanoids into a self-spreading botnet, a backdoor on Chinese robot quadrupeds, and a flaw exposing about seven thousand home robots in twenty-plus countries.

Robots and inverters qualify for FCC jurisdiction by the same principle as routers and drones: they contain embedded radio communication equipment.

On inverters: over 46 gigawatts of US grid capacity runs through them, and in 2020 just 7% of US inverter shipments came from American-headquartered makers.