Pavlo Zvenyhorodskyi and Scott Singer
On what at first glance appeared to be an ordinary workday in March this year at the factory of China’s leading EV manufacturer, Zeekr, a small team of workers went about their usual tasks: lifting boxes, assembling car parts, and performing quality checks. But unlike any typical shift, none of them paused to rest or even stopped for a drink of water. The reason—they were not human. These UBTech robots, powered by a multimodal reasoning model based on DeepSeek R1, were the first publicly known group of humanoid robots deployed as a coordinated team to carry out a wide range of tasks in a complex, real-world industrial setting.1 Just a few months later, UBTech unveiled the Walker S2, the world’s first humanoid robot capable of autonomously changing its own batteries—potentially enabling uninterrupted, twenty-four-hour operation on the factory floor without any human assistance.2
These demonstrations offer a glimpse into leading Chinese companies’ ability to translate frontier AI capabilities into useful real-world industrial applications. More significantly, these private sector achievements have become central to Beijing’s evolving national AI strategy, which seeks to leverage China’s combined strengths in AI software and robotics hardware to achieve a distinctive form of technological leadership. While Washington and most of Silicon Valley focus primarily on scaling large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and digital AI applications, Beijing has placed a fundamentally different bet. It believes that true AI dominance will come from systems capable of autonomous operation in the physical world—AI-powered robotics, commonly known as embodied AI.
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