Even in Silicon Valley, skepticism looms over robots, while 'China has certainly a lot more momentum on humanoids' - Fortune

The most recent developments show China accelerating its lead in industrial humanoids while the United States remains cautious. In early December 2025 CATL announced that its “Moz” humanoid robot is now operating on mass‑production EV‑battery lines, achieving a 99 % insertion success rate by using an end‑to‑end vision model that continuously adapts its posture to material deviations and precisely gauges the force needed to secure thin wires. At the Humanoids Summit in Mountain View (Dec 11‑15, 2025), U.S. industry leaders highlighted growing Chinese momentum, noting that Chinese firms dominate the current deployment pace, even as American companies like Agility Robotics are beginning field trials of its tote‑carrying warehouse robot Digit at a Texas distribution centre for Mercado Libre. Meanwhile, the U.S. startup Foundation disclosed an aggressive scaling plan to build 50 000 humanoid robots by the end of 2027, aiming for 40 units in 2025, 10 000 in 2026 and the remainder in 2027, with a focus on both commercial and military applications. At iREX 2025, China’s AgiBot entered the Japanese market with its vision‑language‑action (VLA) model “ViLLA,” while Yaskawa demonstrated the MOTOMAN NEXT‑NHC 10DE, an autonomous dual‑arm robot that learns packing motions by imitating human demonstrations. These events collectively illustrate rapid progress in humanoid perception, task generalisation and large‑scale production, underscored by a clear split between Chinese deployment velocity and Western market hesitation.

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