A bipartisan bill introduced in March by Senators Tom Cotton and Chuck Schumer and Representative Elise Stefanik proposes to ban U.S. government use of Chinese-made ground robots — including humanoids, quadruped "dogs," and crawlers. The American Security Robotics Act arrived just days after the Federal Communications Commission tightened rules on foreign-made routers, adding another layer to Washington's expanding campaign to decouple sensitive technology from Chinese supply chains.

According to IEEE Spectrum reporting, the twin moves are the latest in a sequence that now stretches across semiconductors, port cranes, logistics data, telecom infrastructure, security cameras, passenger vehicles, and — since December 2025 — uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) such as those sold by DJI. The pattern is unmistakable. But the ground robotics case introduces a tension that policymakers have yet to resolve: American robot makers stand to gain from the elimination of Chinese competitors at the finished-product level, yet many of them still rely on Chinese-made components further down the value chain.

Finished Products vs. the Supply Chain Beneath Them

Ground robots sit at the top of the value chain as finished goods, unlike semiconductors, which are always embedded inside other products. That distinction matters. Banning a finished Chinese robot from a federal warehouse or military base is a relatively clean regulatory action. But if the ban were to extend downward — preventing American manufacturers from sourcing Chinese actuators, sensors, or motor controllers — the calculus shifts dramatically. Companies like Ghost Robotics, one of the few U.S. firms positioned to absorb government demand, could find themselves unable to fulfill orders if their own supplier networks are disrupted.

Sociologist Kyle Chan of the Brookings Institution, who testified before the Congressional Select Committee on U.S.-China strategic competition in April, frames the robot and router restrictions as part of a "long line of growing tech security concerns." Yet the robotics industry is still nascent in the United States. Adoption remains modest, and supply chains are not yet mature. South Korea and Japan produce many critical robot components, which offers a potential pathway for substitution — but only if allied suppliers can scale quickly enough and if Washington provides the kind of industrial-policy clarity that, so far, has been conspicuously absent.

Lessons From the Drone Debacle

The UAS market offers a cautionary precedent. Chinese producers dominate the drone sector so thoroughly that when the FCC added UAS to its import ban list in December, the abrupt cutoff left domestic industry scrambling. Chan described the drone ban as "a sharp and fast switch, which left industry in the lurch," noting the absence of a plan to ramp up domestic production before severing Chinese dependence. The router ban tells a subtly different story: China accounted for only 1.1 percent of U.S. router imports by value in 2025, down from roughly 20.5 percent in 2019, according to the Global Electronics Association. Vietnam, Mexico, and Thailand already supplied more than two-thirds of the market. Even so, the FCC's move surprised the industry, and the conditional 18-month exemptions it granted to companies like Netgear and Adtran underscore the regulatory uncertainty manufacturers face.

Stephen Ezell of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation has argued that the United States lacks "a serious, overarching strategy" for guiding its approach to U.S.-China techno-economic competition. The ground robotics case crystallizes that critique. Policymakers are layering restriction upon restriction — bipartisan support ensures continuity across administrations — but without a coherent framework that distinguishes genuine security vulnerabilities from broader protectionist impulses. Economist Shawn DuBravac of the Global Electronics Association points out that real vulnerabilities often lie in outdated software, unpatched systems, and unchanged default passwords, not necessarily in a product's country of origin.

As the American Security Robotics Act moves through Congress and the FCC continues to refine its covered-product list, the central question for the U.S. robotics industry is not whether decoupling will happen — it will — but whether it will be managed with enough precision and foresight to build genuine domestic capability, or whether it will repeat the pattern of abrupt bans that leave American companies caught between policy ambition and supply-chain reality.

With reporting from IEEE Spectrum Robotics

Source · IEEE Spectrum Robotics