How America is Developing China’s Weapons of War

In October 2022, Unitree Robotics joined Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, and three other firms in signing an open letter pledging not to weaponize their machines and to review customers’ intended applications. This Chinese startup based in Hangzhou had earned its place in that group. Founded in 2016 by a 26-year-old engineer named Wang Xingxing, who quit his job at the drone maker DJI during his probationary period, Unitree set out to build affordable quadruped robots. It worked. By 2023, the company held over 60 percent of the global quadruped robot market by unit sales. Its investors included Sequoia China, Meituan, and Shenzhen Capital Group. Its consumer-grade robot dogs are sold on Amazon.

Two years after the pledge, China’s state broadcaster aired footage of Unitree’s B1 quadrupeds carrying assault rifles in joint military exercises between the Chinese and Cambodian armed forces. By September 2025, robot dogs appeared in China’s largest-ever military parade on Chang’an Avenue. In July of the same year, a military training exercise at a Chongqing vocational college — jointly developed by students, faculty, and a military training team — featured Unitree machines fitted with rifles and rocket launchers. In an August 2025 statement, Unitree affirmed that it “has always been a civilian robotics company” and that all militarized modifications were made by third parties.

The interesting thing is, Unitree isn’t really lying. And that is precisely the policy problem. Unitree did not seek out the Chinese military. The Chinese Communist Party brought the military to Unitree through channels that required no direct order, no classified contract, and no corporate consent. Understanding how that system works, and why current U.S. policy does not reach it, is the most urgent analytical gap in the American response to Chinese military-civil fusion.