New Delhi, Sep 26 (IANS): The latest move by the US to restrict Chinese-made advanced robots is seen as critical in ensuring that China’s edge in this field is contained, while protecting national security from the “possible risks of espionage”, a new report has claimed.
According to a report in Eurasia Review, the emerging robot competition is being seen as not the equation of who produces the most in volume or in terms of sophistication, but more about “the party controlling the machines, supply chains and standards that connect artificial intelligence to the real battlefront stakes”.
Both Washington and Beijing understand the stakes involved.
Washington is trying to block foreign — especially Chinese — advanced robots before they sit inside US factories and ports, writes Collins Chong Yew Keat.
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently put them on its ‘Covered’ List over surveillance, cyberattack, supply-chain disruption, and remote compromise.
The concerns include surveillance, cyberattack, supply-chain disruption, and the risk of remote compromise.
“The fear is that these will give strategic advantage to adversaries, just like what a Trojan horse could do. All these change the security equation, similar to the threats of cyber warfare and the calculations regarding TikTok and Huawei in the past,” the article argues.
The US approach is seen as a strategic denial: prevent risky dependency before the scale is acquired.
In 2024, China produced about 300,000 industrial robots and the US installed nearly 34,000.
While America leads models, chips and cloud, China leads plants and deployed machines.
“The United States has learned an uncomfortable lesson, that dependency is easiest to prevent before it becomes dependency. Once foreign technology has deeply integrated into national infrastructure, jettisoning it will be expensive and politically difficult,” observes the article.
The fear of the Chinese robots being the Trojan horse that can affect the American and Western tech dominance and also in undermining the cyber and military advantage will always be of strategic concern, despite attempts to view them as overblown, the article says.
Reported vulnerabilities in Chinese robotic platforms have validated and strengthened the concern.
“The broader objective is two-pronged, to deny Chinese platforms the space to dominate America’s robotic and AI infrastructure, while building a competitive US-and-allied embodied and supported AI ecosystem of its own,” the article adds.
