China’s Terminator has entered the US, but its stay might be short-lived as support grows in Washington for a ban on Chinese robot imports.
Footage circulating on social media shows Shenzhen-based EngineAI’s heavy-duty T800 humanoid robot demonstrating its agility in San Francisco and Brooklyn. It was imported by the SF-based startup REK, short for Robot Entertainment Kombat. Its founder, Cix Liv, says the T800’s punch is 4x harder than Mike Tyson’s.
REK is just one of several organizations working toward a fantasy that began more than 60 years ago.
The popular tabletop game, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, arrived in 1965, shortly after The Twilight Zone explored the idea of lifelike androids as boxers. That episode’s source material, Richard Matheson’s short story Steel, also inspired Real Steel, the 2011 movie that convinced many of today’s rising names in robotics that humanoid fighting is a good idea.
The Denver Mad Scientists Club held the first known robot combat event in 1989, which pitted homemade bots against each other during a sci-fi convention. Then, in 1994, Lucasfilm engineer Marc Thorpe launched Robot Wars in San Francisco. The competition, which featured remote-controlled machines battling inside a fortified arena, grew into the late 1990s until a legal dispute halted it. The BBC aired its own version starting in 1998.
Back in the US, veteran builders Greg Munson and Trey Roski held the first BattleBots contest in Long Beach, Calif., in 1999. Just a year later, it began airing on Comedy Central places, of all places, sandwiched between South Park and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In the show, mobile robots faced off in a square cage with hazards like popup sawblades and spikes. The show ended abruptly in late 2002, but the concept lived on in educational spinoffs and a 2015 reboot on ABC.
Today, a new breed of increasingly autonomous humanlike machines is bringing the concept to a new, much more dangerous level.
The T800 is the flagship full-sized humanoid robot from the 3-year-old startup EngineAI, founded by serial entrepreneur Zhao Tongyang, who previously led XPENG’s humanoid program.
The startup recently began mass producing the robots at its new intelligent manufacturing base in Shenzhen. The factory covers more than 12,000 square meters (130,000 square feet) and can reportedly build a humanoid robot every 15 minutes. EngineAI is planning a larger manufacturing headquarters more inland in Zhengzhou to churn out even more of the robots.
It’s scaling toward 10,000 units annually after securing around $200 million in a Series B round in April 2026. The funding brought its total amount raised so far to at least $350 million and pushed its valuation to $1.5 billion. The startup is reportedly seeking a public listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, where it would join fellow Shenzhen humanoid makers UBTECH Robotics and Dobot, as well as Shanghai’s Seer Robotics, which specializes in AI-powered robot controllers and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs).
Standing 1.7 meters (5 feet 8 inches), the T800 is leading EngineAI’s new factory rollout. It weighs 75 kg (165 lbs), has 29 degrees of freedom (DoF), and comes equipped with three-fingered hands with seven moving joints each. Final production versions of the robot are reportedly closer to 1.8 meters (6 feet) and 85 kg (nearly 200 lbs).
The robot boasts significantly higher torque than most modern humanoids at 450 Nm, which on paper surpasses 90 percent of men in their prime. However, its payload capacity is lower than rivals like Atlas from Boston Dynamics at around 5 kg (11 lbs) per hand.
The T800 is the same robot that went viral for kicking its creator in the chest to prove it’s real, and for patrolling the streets with Shenzhen’s finest.
EngineAI is marketing the robot as a general-purpose worker for use across sectors. Its name is inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in The Terminator series. It’s priced starting around $25,000, though the cost is significantly higher for overseas buyers due to tariffs.
Sixteen of the robots are being trained for EngineAI’s Ultimate Robot Knockout League (URKL) planned for later in 2026. The startup is supplying the humanoids to teams from universities and robotics labs, who are customizing their artificial intelligence and outfitting them with protective gear. They’re competing for a top prize of $1.5 million in what EngineAI calls the first-ever fully autonomous robot combat league.
Humanoid fighting is soaring in popularity in China, which is expected to manufacture more than 50,000 humanoids by the end of 2026, three years after Beijing set a national goal to lead the market.
Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics is also actively recruiting teams and operators globally for its upcoming World Robot Competition. The event ups the ante compared to the first-of-its-kind tournament held by Unitree in 2025, which featured child-sized G1 robots remotely operated by humans. This time, organizers are calling for full-sized humanoids to get into the ring.
In the US, REK started hosting underground fight clubs with Unitree’s compact humanoids in 2025. The startup is opening a storefront in San Francisco, where people can buy, repair, or repair humanoid robots.
The location could give easier access to research-grade humanoids to the growing number of physical AI startups in Silicon Valley. It’ll double as a place where people can pilot real robots, including the T800, in real-time cage matches.
The plans could be dampened, however, if the US government bans Chinese humanoids.
According to Politico, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently told executives from companies like SpaceX, Boston Dynamics, JP Morgan, Siemens, and Rockwell Automation that his department is considering restrictions on state-subsidized Chinese robotics imports. The meeting focused on reshoring and rebuilding the US industrial base for robots and advanced manufacturing.
Chinese robots already face tariffs, but Lutnick’s remarks suggest additional measures that align with bipartisan proposals in the US House and Senate.
The House Select Committee on the CCP recently introduced the GUARD Act, which directs national security agencies to review robotic systems from countries of concern, primarily China. Robots tagged as threats would be added to the FCC’s Covered List, effectively banning their importation and use in sensitive US infrastructure. A separate bill filed in the Senate by Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York and Republican Tom Cotton of Arkansas would block federal agencies from buying or using robots manufactured by foreign adversaries like China.
Both proposals would have Chinese robots in the same regulatory category as Huawei telecommunications equipment and DJI drones. They have a decent shot of moving forward, especially if they’re attached to must-pass legislation like the annual Defense Authorization Act.
Leading US robotics firms like Agility Robotics and Boston Dynamics have expressed support for restrictions on Chinese imports. But others, like Cix Liv, say a ban would make the US even farther behind in robotics because there are no viable American alternatives on the market.
However, the situation has inspired at least one of the West’s leading humanoid firms, 1X Technologies, to accelerate the delivery of its NEO humanoids to developers. On social media, 1X founder Bernt Bornich said the West having a proper humanoid development platform is too important for the future of humanity to continue to gatekeep.
“The NEO hardware, by way of being safe, affordable, and capable (able to carry heavy loads with human-level dexterity) is uniquely well positioned to accelerate humanoid robotics research and the robotics startup ecosystem by orders of magnitude,” he said.
He promised more specifics will be announced soon, and assured that it won’t delay deliveries of its humanoids for households, which are priced at $499 per month to lease or $20,000 to buy outright.