The United States has moved to block new imports of foreign-made robots and power inverters. Officials fear a hostile power could spy through them, or switch them off from afar. The order never says China. It does not need to.
The Federal Communications Commission added two categories to its Covered List on Tuesday, as first reported by CNBC. One is “advanced robotic devices,” meaning mobile robots such as humanoids and quadrupeds. The other is connected power inverters, the boxes that connect solar panels, batteries and data-centre gear to the grid.
Landing on the Covered List is a hard commercial block. Equipment on it cannot get FCC authorisation. Almost every electronic device needs that clearance before it can reach the US market. It is the same lever the agency pulled on DJI drones and Huawei network kit.
The word the ban avoids
Read the FCC document and one thing stands out. It restricts foreign-produced robots and inverters “regardless of the nationality of origin.” The politics point at Beijing. The text points at everyone.
The gap is deliberate. The framing lets Washington name China as the threat. The wording pushes every manufacturer toward the same choice: build in America, or clear a security review. An administration official told CNBC the aim was to protect the US AI buildout and drive firms to reshore. “Economic security is national security,” the official said.
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There is a door out. A maker can apply for “Conditional Approval” and keep selling if it clears the check. The Department of War handles robots; Homeland Security handles inverters. In principle any manufacturer can walk through it, Chinese firms included. In practice it puts the Pentagon in charge of vetting which robots reach American shelves.
Why robots and inverters, together
The pairing looks odd until you read the security case. Both devices are networked, and both answer to signals from far away.
Grid inverters phone home for monitoring and firmware updates. The interagency determination warns that the same channel could let a foreign firm “turn off the inverters or use them to collect and exfiltrate data.” More solar and battery capacity on the grid means more remote-controllable boxes.
Robots carry the same risk on legs. The robot determination warns that networked machines “collect data that could be leveraged by malign actors to surveil Americans,” or let an attacker “remotely commandeer the robots.” Unitree is the emblem of the category. The Chinese firm’s humanoids and quadrupeds have gone from lab demos to a pending public listing, and the Pentagon has already flagged the company.
What it actually changes
Less than the headlines suggest, at least at first. The block hits only new device models seeking authorisation. It does not touch robots or inverters already bought, models already approved, or anything the federal government buys and uses.
So this is an import gate, not a recall. Its bite grows over time, as newer models are the ones frozen out while older approved ones stay on sale. The FCC used the same staged approach on drones and consumer routers. CISA now tells companies to screen suppliers against the list.
The harder question is whether the US can fill the gap. China dominates both supply chains. The same rare-earth and battery chokeholds that complicated the drone ban apply here. Blocking imports is quick. Building a domestic industry to replace them is slow, and so is hardening a grid whose weak points attackers are already probing.
For now, Washington has drawn the line where it is easiest: at the border, on the next generation of machines. Whether the factories follow is the test that matters. A listing will not settle it.
