America Leads In AI. China Builds The Robots

Assembling a robot in America doesn’t make it an American robot. Sen. Dave McCormick says the motors and magnets inside still come from China.

China installed 54% of the world’s new industrial robots in 2024. That’s more than every other country combined. A decade ago China imported nearly three-quarters of its robots. Now it builds most of them itself. The state has also put up a fund meant to draw nearly $138 billion into robotics and other advanced industries over the next two decades. In July the FCC added advanced robots from foreign adversaries to a national-security blocklist, a step aimed squarely at China.

American companies still lead in the software, the models you type into. However, they don’t lead in physical AI, the robots and systems that make products and move goods. Those machines almost always get built somewhere else.

I asked Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) what to do about it. He starts with a complaint about where robotics sits in Washington. “If we treat robotics as a footnote to AI policy, we miss the fact that this is fundamentally an industrial competition, not just a technology competition,” he says. Robotics, as he describes it, “is about the physical infrastructure that turns intelligence into action,” and he lists “the motors, the manufacturing lines, the supply chains, the workforce that builds and operates these machines.”

Being ahead in software counts for less than it looks if a rival builds the machines that act on it. The deeper problem, in his telling, isn’t the robots. It’s what’s inside them.

Why Robotics Needs Its Own Strategy

His National Commission on Robotics Act would create a federal body focused only on robotics. Software scales by copying. A robot has to be sourced, built, powered and maintained, which is an industrial capability a country either has or doesn’t. China worked that out years ago.