Rajat Bhageria started Chef Robotics in San Francisco seven years ago to put robot arms into food factories. Now he is trying to rebuild his product without a single Chinese part, and it’s going worse than he expected. Final assembly already happens in the US, but the plastic utensils at the end of the arms are all made in China. He tried to move that production last year. American shops either quoted prices that made no sense or turned the job down.
His problem is a small version of a national one.
A list that keeps growing
Washington has been adding whole categories of foreign-made connected devices to the FCC’s Covered List, which stops new models from getting the equipment authorization they need to be sold. Drones went first, in December 2025. Consumer routers followed in March. On July 28, the agency added power inverters and “advanced robotic devices,” a category that names humanoids and quadrupeds but is broad enough to reach robot vacuums, pool cleaners and lawn mowers. The FCC acted on a national security finding from an executive-branch panel, which pointed to the remote connectivity of inverters as a risk to the power grid.
The rules have limits. They apply to new models, products authorized before July 28 can still be sold, and companies can apply for conditional approval. On August 20, the FCC narrowed the inverter definition to grid-connected units. Around the FCC sit other measures: a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles, a ban on cars running Chinese software, and drone tariffs that took effect last month. This month the administration criticized Ford over its use of Chinese-made CATL batteries. Ford denies it is handing US manufacturing to Chinese companies.
Why swapping suppliers is so hard
The trouble is volume. Michael Murray, CEO of Kopin, says it took his company more than two years to move some micro display production from China to the US, and that US-made parts cost up to 25% more. Pentagon funding covered part of the bill. By his estimate, China makes more micro displays in a week than the US does in a year.
Speed is the second problem. Saman Farid, founder of the coalition Robots for America, puts it this way: by the time an American company finishes its first prototype, a Chinese rival may be on version three.
Universities feel it too. A professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign says replacing Chinese humanoids in labs could cost ten times more, and that some drone models have no American equivalent at all. IDC analyst Jitesh Ubrani expects consumers to end up paying more.
The magnet cliff
The sharpest deadline is in rare earths. Ghost Robotics, which builds robot dogs for industry and the military, has moved motor production from China to South Korea and buys its magnets from a European company. But the raw material still comes from China. From January 1, 2027, a Pentagon sourcing rule bars neodymium and samarium-cobalt magnets from weapons systems if any stage of their production, from mining to the finished magnet, happened in China. Analysts warn that a compliant supply chain isn’t ready, and one recent analysis notes the deadline lands about seven weeks after China’s own export suspension on rare earth magnets is due to expire on November 10.
What to watch
The policy is a bet on sequencing: ban first, build second. Ghost Robotics’ CEO, Gavin Kenneally, thinks it will work in the long run, because such rules are signaled in advance and push companies to move. The risk sits in the gap. During those years, American startups, labs and consumers pay more and build slower than competitors who still have the full Chinese supply chain.
Three things will show whether the bet pays off: how many conditional approvals the FCC grants, whether fixed industrial robot arms land on the list next (Bhageria’s worry), and what happens on January 1.