A new “arms race” has broken out with China—this time it’s for robotic soldiers, and experts warn that Beijing may have already taken the lead.

So what exactly is an A.I.-powered combat robot and what does it do? For starters, they’re “humanoid,” meaning they resemble the anatomy of a human with a torso, head, two legs, and two arms. (Think: C-3PO from Star Wars.) “That makes a certain amount of sense because the human form factor is what we’ve designed the world around,” says Michael Hochberg, PhD, physicist and president of Periplous, a technology consulting company.

These futuristic soldiers can carry rifles and grenade launchers—or the weapons can be integrated directly into the robot’s design. “The reason you’d build a humanoid [robot] is so that it can use the same kind of weapons a human would use,” says Hochberg. “But many of the robot systems people are deploying in combat—they’re using heavier weapons, or they’re using weapons that are bolted on in one way or another.”

The AI soldiers also have working faces. In place of features such as eyes and ears, their faces are covered with all kinds of visual (including night vision) and audio sensors, Hochberg explains. The robots process this data—what they’re “seeing” and “hearing” in their environment—to make decisions a human normally would, such as identifying an enemy and firing a weapon.

Robotic soldiers are part of an emerging class of lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS), which also includes AI-guided loitering munitions. The U.S. Department of Defense says these kinds of weapons are “capable of both independently identifying a target and employing an onboard weapon to engage and destroy the target without manual human control,” according to a 2024 report on emerging defense technologies from the Congressional Research Service. However, in some cases, there’s still a human involved in the decision-making.

For example, last November, the People’s Liberation Army showcased a combat robot that mimics the movements of its remote human operator, using real-time A.I. Since it requires a human, it’s not autonomous. And in April of last year, China’s Tien Kung Ultra humanoid robot made history by winning the world’s first humanoid robot half marathon in Beijing—but it required three people to help control it.

Still, China has an obvious advantage over the U.S., as the country has already developed and deployed an eye-watering number of robots outside of the military sector. According to a 2025 New York Times report, “There are more robots working in China than the rest of the world combined.” The New York Post agrees, stating, China has “nearly 10 times as many robots in factories as the U.S.”

In 2025, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), a nonprofit trade group for robotics manufacturers, reported that China’s operational robot stock exceeded 2 million units the previous year. Needless to say, that number has only continued growing since. In fact, in 2024 alone, China installed roughly 295,000 robots. On the other side of the coin, the United States installed just over 34,000 the same year—most of which were imported from Europe and Japan, according to the IFR report.

But where China has early scale, the U.S. has decades of combat data. In fact, the U.S. has already sent two robots to Ukraine, which are conducting frontline reconnaissance. This gives the U.S. a distinct advantage, as the military will be able to use the data they collect from this “test run” to optimize future iterations of A.I. soldiers.

Still, no technology is perfect—especially not on the battlefield.

According to an interview with Kanaka Rajan, PhD—a Harvard computational neuroscientist who studies A.I.—there are several risks associated with A.I. in weapons in general. For instance, Kanaka warns that humans may use A.I.-powered autonomous technology to deflect responsibility. Likewise, she cautions that A.I. weapons remove the human cost of warfare, which could lead to even greater consequences.

“It becomes politically easier to start wars, which, in turn, may lead to more death and destruction overall,” Kanaka says.