China's humanoid robots smash records as the US trails in the robotics race

A five-day spectacle in Beijing

The second World Humanoid Robot Games concluded in Beijing this week, and according to The Verge, it delivered both genuine technical breakthroughs and an abundance of slapstick. A humanoid built by smartphone maker Honor shed a leg mid-sprint, another burst into flames after bouncing off a crash mat, and a weightlifting entrant toppled slowly into the judges' table. The five-day competition took place in Beijing's National Speed Skating Oval, a former Olympic venue, and was already much larger than the inaugural event a year earlier.

The programme mixed familiar sports — sprinting, football, boxing, weightlifting — with contests in bed-making, parcel delivery, shelf stacking, clothes folding, hammering nails and, fittingly, firefighting. As The Verge points out, the mundane events reflected the real purpose of the games: pushing robots out of the laboratory and into the messy environments where their makers eventually want them to work.

Records fell, usefulness lagged

For all the tumbling bodies, the results illustrate how quickly the field has advanced. One humanoid covered 100 metres in 9.39 seconds, quicker than Usain Bolt's 2009 world record, and another cleared 2.88 metres in the standing high jump, nearly half a metre beyond a human mark that has stood since 1993. At the first games a year earlier, the winning sprint time was a laborious 21.50 seconds and the best jump just 0.95 metres.

The contrast between the flashy and the humdrum was just as revealing. The Verge notes that while the athletic events made for compelling video, tasks such as picking up soybeans with tweezers or weighing powder showed how far humanoids remain from dependable, useful work. Several events permitted human teleoperation at the cost of a scoring penalty, a reminder that reliable autonomy in factories or homes has not arrived yet.

A medal table with one flag

China swept the competition. AgiBot and Tien Kung dominated the medals, each collecting more than nearly every other entrant combined, apart from each other. The participation numbers explain much of that: according to state-run China Daily, cited by The Verge, 641 of the 666 teams were Chinese, representing 157 companies and 200 universities. Prominent American developers — Tesla, Boston Dynamics and Figure — did not compete at all.

Even accounting for the thin international field, The Verge reads the breadth of Chinese institutions on display as evidence of how rapidly the country's robotics sector is maturing, even amid worries about circular investment, companies without viable products and a possible humanoid bubble.

More staging posts are ahead. Beijing has not confirmed a third edition of the games, but the city has scheduled another humanoid half-marathon for April, and China intends to open its first robot-run hotel next year.

Washington's widening gap

The US still leads in frontier AI and advanced chips, but The Verge reports that China has been closing parts of that gap while making embodied AI a national strategic priority. Washington, by contrast, has devoted far less attention to robotics over the years and now trails in manufacturing, deployment and hardware.

Policy may compound the problem. Recent American restrictions on foreign robots, a measure aimed squarely at China, could backfire because domestic companies rely heavily on Chinese components, The Verge reports. As the outlet's Sean Hollister observed, the ban covered not just humanoids and quadrupeds but robot vacuums as well. A Business Insider report by Lloyd Lee made a related argument: American machines may run on US software, but their bodies are frequently built in China, which points to a hardware supply chain in need of strengthening.

Why it matters

The games were partly comedy, but the trend underneath them is serious. China is treating embodied AI — software that acts in the physical world — as a matter of state strategy, and it leads in the manufacturing, deployment and hardware that robots depend on. The US retains its strengths in models and chips, yet its bans on Chinese robots sit uneasily alongside its reliance on Chinese parts. There is also a data dimension: unlike language models, robots cannot be trained purely on scraped web text, because real-world interaction data has to be generated — one reason companies are so eager to film humans doing chores. The country that builds, tests and fields the most machines will compound its advantage. The Verge's verdict is that Washington can still close the gap, but only with deliberate, sustained effort while the technology keeps accelerating.