China is exploring humanoid robots for war – but what role could ...

At the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, a humanoid robot named Tiangong Ultra ran the 100-metre sprint in a staggering 8.64 seconds, shattering Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt’s legendary human world record of 9.58 seconds.

The internet laughed at the robots’ awkward, lurching finishes and spectacular falls – but the laughter masked a chilling reality.

Just two days after the games concluded the official newspaper of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) called for researchers to accelerate moving these cutting-edge machines from the laboratory to military training grounds. They referred to them not as experiments, but as “combatants”. With enough skill, a dedicated adversary can replicate advanced robotic behaviour with relative ease. We can no longer afford to treat humanoid robotics purely as an academic pursuit or a commercial novelty. We need an urgent international conversation about how to control these advances.

Just as we regulate the export of certain microchips and aerospace components, we must begin protecting the software architecture and training pipelines that give these machines their minds. The hardware is walking out of the lab – it is time our policies caught up. Carbon fibre and aluminium bodies keep mass and inertia (how a robot’s mass resists change) low. Advancements in actuator technology deliver torque capacities of up to 400Nm (Newton-metres – a unit of torque, or twisting force) in humanoid joints, providing the ultimate combination of power and agility.

What you saw on the track in Beijing was not just a triumph of motors, but a triumph of coding. A real breakthrough is happening in software.

Robots are trained in virtual simulation environments, running millions of trial-and-error scenarios through reinforcement learning before the robot ever takes a physical step. Reinforcement learning is an area of artificial intelligence (AI) where robots make decisions based on the results of their actions.