How many companies can build the same robot before the industry itself begins to collapse? The question finally gained an answer in China, where the race for humanoids grew so quickly that the government needed to intervene to prevent the rush from turning into nationwide waste and a bubble from forming and bursting.
The alert from the National Development and Reform Commission comes as a sudden brake in a sector accustomed to constant euphoria, because more than 150 manufacturers of humanoid robots compete for the same space, producing similar machines, with identical ambitions and little real differentiation.
The government that previously fueled this progress with generous incentives, now exposes the fragility behind the speed, excess, redundancy and the silent threat of industrial bubbles, the change in tone is profound, local subsidies created an unbridled explosion of technology companies, a scenario that became so vast that it became a cause for national alert.
The new priority makes it clear that the quantity is no longer impressive, the goal becomes concrete innovation instead of recycled clones that rely on the same supply chain and exhibit the same core defect, competent hardware, insufficient artificial intelligence.
Criticism focuses on the heart of the dispute, apparently advanced machines that do not yet think, incapable of delivering the cognitive leap that the sector promises.
China is home to veterans such as Unitree and Deep Robotics, now targeting bipeds, Shanghai is transformed into a hub of embedded AI bringing together Edge Bots, Forer and Kepler; Shenzen maintains hardware dominance by combining listed giants and space-seeking upstarts; Beijing concentrates research companies, forming an agglomerate where density became synonymous with potential waste.
For the government, that vibrant mosaic risks repeating the collapse of the electric vehicle era, massive investments resulting in same-same products, with no real advancement of technology; The engineering of the body is already mature, balance, gait and structure, the bottleneck moves to the brain, processing, interpreting, working in a meaningful way, it is at that point where criticism gains strength.
The industry is running but not moving, hardware has overtaken AI, creating a gap that will only become more visible as regulatory pressure increases; The era of irrational experimentation is fading, replaced by rigorous filtering that will separate real value from masked repetition.
From now on, for Chinese robotics, survival no longer depends on launching a human and so on, but on finally justifying its existence.
