FCC Covered List Bans New Foreign Mobile Robots in US

Evan Ackerman

Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.

The Conversation (1)

Lucas Laursen

Lucas Laursen04 Aug, 2026

We'd love to hear from readers working in the industry on how they or their companies are adapting to this development. Does it mean you'll have to move some of your fabrication or replace suppliers? What's that going to cost? Were customers already demanding this kind of thing?

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2 min read But not all companies expect major changes from the new regulation. American customers “need to know they can audit the technology, get support quickly, and keep the system operating without depending on a fragile overseas supply chain,” Nic Radford, the CEO of the U.S. humanoid robotics company Persona, tells IEEE Spectrum. In other words, he figures some customers wouldn’t have wanted Chinese humanoids anyway.

Philipp Frey, vice president of strategy for the Swiss quadruped company ANYbotics, agrees. He says their enterprise customers in the United States “increasingly evaluate robots on long-term reliability, cybersecurity, software capability, safety certification, serviceability, and ecosystem integration, not on hardware cost alone.” 6h

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