The Battle Over Chinese Humanoids: As Congress Debates the GUARD Act, Industry Divides Over National Security vs. Research Reality

Key Takeaways

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• A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee held a hearing on the GUARD Act, where AUVSI leadership warned that Chinese robotics could mirror the market-dominance playbook previously seen in commercial drones.
• Agility CEO Peggy Johnson penned an op-ed backing the proposed import ban, arguing that Chinese state subsidies and cybersecurity risks threaten American industrial and national security.
• Industry figures, including former 1X VP of AI Eric Jang, publicly condemned the restrictions, warning they would cripple U.S. research labs heavily reliant on affordable hardware like Unitree's platforms.
• The geopolitical friction arrives just as Unitree CEO Wang Xingxing was featured on the cover of TIME, highlighting the company's commanding global market share and hardware volume lead.

The geopolitical battlelines slicing through the artificial intelligence sector are rapidly hardening around physical hardware. On Capitol Hill this week, lawmakers intensified a national debate over foreign robotics, sparking a deep and increasingly public schism within the U.S. tech ecosystem over how to balance national security with the realities of global research.

At the center of the dispute is the Guarding the U.S. Against Adversarial Robotics Dominance (GUARD) Act, a bipartisan bill that would mandate strict security reviews of humanoid and quadruped robots manufactured by foreign adversaries, threatening to place unreviewed or compromised systems on the FCC’s Covered List.

The legislation received a critical hearing on Wednesday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Communications and Technology Subcommittee, drawing high-profile endorsements from domestic automation leaders and fierce, immediate blowback from researchers on the frontlines of AI development.

The Drone Playbook and Domestic Defense

For proponents of the GUARD Act, the rise of Chinese humanoids is a matter of both economic survival and cybersecurity. Testifying before the subcommittee, Michael Robbins, President and CEO of the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), explicitly compared the current robotics landscape to the U.S. commercial drone market—an industry that was largely captured by Chinese giant DJI over the last decade.

"Drone technology was invented in America. The scaling, however, took place in China over a decade," Robbins testified, pointing to a combination of massive state subsidies and deliberate market dumping. Robbins warned lawmakers that the same strategy is now aimed at robotics, noting that Chinese firms already account for roughly 90% of global humanoid shipments. Beyond economic capture, he cited the national security threat of "flying sensors," arguing that a compromised robot could physically move and surveil inside critical infrastructure like factories or military bases.

This sentiment was forcefully echoed by Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility. In an op-ed published July 23, Johnson explicitly endorsed the GUARD Act, characterizing it as a necessary tool to prevent another foundational technology from slipping to Beijing.

"Evaluating Chinese robotics platforms solely through the lens of proven data theft... ignores the long-term strategic risk: state-backed manufacturers who leverage subsidies and below-market pricing to rapidly gain market share," Johnson wrote.

Agility stands to benefit directly from a protected domestic market. The Oregon-based company—which recently announced plans to go public via a $2.5 billion SPAC merger—has aggressively pursued industrial clients like GXO and Schaeffler. By securing OSHA-recognized safety approvals and successfully hitting high-volume material handling milestones, Agility is attempting to position its Digit platform as the secure, American-made standard for the industrial sector.

Johnson also pointed to documented cybersecurity vulnerabilities in foreign hardware, referencing a hidden, pre-installed backdoor known as "CloudSail" found in Unitree's Go1 robot dogs, which lawmakers previously dubbed "Trojan horses."

The Counter-Argument: "Shooting Ourselves in the Foot"

However, the prospect of a blanket ban on Chinese hardware has triggered alarm bells across Western software and AI laboratories. Because companies like Agility have largely restricted their platforms to closed, enterprise pilots rather than selling open research platforms, Hangzhou-based Unitree has become the de facto hardware baseline for American AI developers.

Eric Jang, a prominent roboticist who recently stepped down as VP of AI at 1X Technologies, took to X to sharply criticize Agility's stance, calling the proposed GUARD Act a "terrible, short-sighted move."

"USA is not in the position of strength where enacting GUARD act would improve prospects for US robotics companies in the short or medium term," Jang argued. "Nearly every US lab doing research on humanoids uses a Unitree robot because it is the best product for research."

Jang dismissed the cybersecurity anxieties surrounding Unitree's CloudSail as a "scare tactic," likening the remote access tunnel to standard fleet observability tools like Tailscale used by Western tech firms. He noted the irony of banning Chinese hardware when the U.S. supply chain remains inextricably linked to Chinese components, stating, "I don't know a single US humanoid company that isn't dependent on Chinese magnets somewhere along the chain."

Instead of a hardware ban, Jang proposed enacting stricter data exfiltration laws, challenging American manufacturers to build better research platforms at competitive costs rather than lobbying for market protections. In response to this looming hardware vacuum, some Western companies are already pivoting; 1X Technologies recently announced it is accelerating its NEO developer release specifically to provide researchers an alternative to Chinese imports.

The TIME Cover and Unitree’s Scale

The legislative debate in Washington coincides with a massive media moment for the exact company lawmakers are targeting. This week, TIME magazine featured Unitree founder and CEO Wang Xingxing on its cover, flanked by the company's towering GD01 mecha robot.

The TIME feature underscored exactly why Unitree has captured the Western research market. The company shipped over 5,500 units in 2025—comprising over a quarter of the global market. With the G1 humanoid's pretax price slashed to $13,500 and their quadruped dogs retailing for under $2,000, Unitree is winning a brutal manufacturing cost-efficiency war.

Crucially, the profile revealed that 74% of Unitree’s humanoid sales are to universities, research institutions, and individual developers. If the GUARD Act passes, it is this exact pipeline of affordable hardware into American labs that will be abruptly severed.

Wang himself downplayed the cybersecurity fears, insisting to TIME that Unitree's products operate disconnected from the network unless permitted by the client. As the U.S. Congress pushes to label these machines as national security threats, the fundamental tension remains unresolved: Can the United States protect its physical infrastructure and foster domestic hardware champions without caging the very researchers who are building the brains of tomorrow's robots?