China's spy balloon floated over Montana while Washington debated whether to shoot it down.
Now the same regime is selling humanoid robots that hackers can turn into weapons.
Brendan Carr just banned China's robots after learning exactly what they could do behind closed doors.
Security Researchers Found Chinese Robots Could Infect Each Other Like a Virus
The Federal Communications Commission added foreign-made humanoid robots, four-legged robot dogs, and power inverters to its Covered List on Tuesday.
That list is the same one that took down Huawei.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said the move keeps America "in lock step with our national security agencies" as it locks Chinese hardware out of the country for good.
Carr didn't do this on a hunch.
Cybersecurity researchers spent the last year and a half tearing apart robots built by Unitree, the Chinese company that dominates the global market for humanoid machines.
What they found should terrify anyone who has ever let one of these things into their house or their office.
A Bluetooth flaw called UniPwn let hackers seize root-level control of Unitree's humanoid and quadruped robots from a distance, no login required.
The infected robot could then scan for other Unitree machines nearby and take those over too, spreading itself like a self-replicating botnet with legs.
Before that, researchers had already found a hidden backdoor in Unitree's Go1 robot dog that phoned home to a cloud server in China and handed strangers live access to its cameras and microphones.
That flaw was traced into robots already sitting inside labs at MIT, Princeton, and Carnegie Mellon.
Nobody has patched it.
The FCC's own national security determination didn't mince words, warning that these machines can be used to spy on Americans, feed foreign intelligence services, or let outsiders "remotely commandeer the robots" themselves.
Translate that out of bureaucrat and it means this: the robot vacuuming your floor or greeting customers at the front desk could be a live microphone and camera feeding straight back to Beijing.
Carr Says the Threat Reaches Into America's Power Grid Too
The FCC didn't stop at robots.
It also banned foreign-made power inverters, the devices that convert solar energy into the electricity running through American homes and businesses.
Chinese firms like Huawei and Sungrow dominate that market, and the FCC warned that the remote access built into these devices creates vulnerabilities that only multiply as more of them get wired into the American grid.
Translation: Beijing could reach into pieces of America's power grid and shut the lights off from across the Pacific.
Republicans in Congress are treating this like the national emergency it is.
Rep. John Moolenaar, who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said the FCC's action "protects our country and strengthens our nation's robotics industry."
Moolenaar wants Congress to go further and pass his bill targeting Chinese robots for mandatory national security review.
Even Chuck Schumer signed onto legislation with Sen. Tom Cotton banning the federal government from buying Chinese-made robots, warning the Chinese Communist Party is "running their standard playbook" to flood American markets with compromised technology.
When Chuck Schumer and a national security hawk agree China's robots are a threat, the threat is real.
Beijing, predictably, is furious.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning whined that "protectionism does not make the U.S. more competitive," which is rich coming from a government that subsidizes its own robotics companies to undercut American manufacturers on price.
One Chinese company alone, AgiBot, shipped more than five thousand humanoid robots last year, nearly forty percent of everything sold worldwide.
The Botnet in Your Living Room Nobody Wanted to Talk About
Here's what fires me up about this one: we already ran this exact play with Huawei, and it took the FCC years to act while Chinese telecom gear sat inside American networks collecting data.
This time Washington didn't wait for a crisis before shutting the door.
Robots walk into your living room, your hospital, your kid's classroom, and none of them ask permission before they start collecting.
Handing that kind of access to a country whose laws force every company to cooperate with its intelligence services was never going to end well.
Trump is set to meet Xi Jinping in September, and this ban lands on the table as a reminder that America isn't negotiating from its knees anymore.
The robots being blocked today are the same category of machine Beijing wants humming through American homes and offices by the end of the decade.
Carr just made sure that future gets built with American hardware instead of Chinese spyware wearing a friendly face.
Sources:
- Dylan Kresak, "Trump Administration Bans Chinese Humanoid Robots, Robot Dogs Over National Security Concerns," The Daily Caller, July 29, 2026.
- "FCC Bans Foreign Humanoid Robots, Power Inverters Amid China Concerns," The Epoch Times, July 28, 2026.
- Federal Communications Commission, National Security Determination on Foreign-Produced Robots, July 28, 2026.
- Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC), statement on X, July 28, 2026.
