Three regulatory actions landed inside twenty-four hours, in three jurisdictions, aimed at three different problems. What they have in common is that none of them used a statute written for the technology in question. The FCC’s ban on foreign advanced robotic devices covers any new ground-based, software-controlled wireless robot weighing more than 4.4 pounds. Because the threshold is defined by mass and locomotion rather than by capability, the rule reaches warehouse automation platforms, inspection robots, delivery machines, and consumer robot vacuums alike.

I think the security case about foreign-made connected devices is real. A camera-equipped, always-on machine that maps the interior of a home and phones a server abroad is a genuine collection platform, and the people who spent a decade warning about this were not being paranoid. I’ve written that a network of them inside government buildings would be an intelligence problem worth acting on. So I should be the natural audience for the FCC’s new rule.

For most of the history of industrial robotics, the machine and the task were synonymous. A welding robot welded. A pick-and-place robot picked and placed. The intelligence was in the fixture, the jig, the controlled environment — not in the robot. General purpose robotics represents the dismantling of that assumption, and the pace of that dismantling has accelerated sharply. The GAO’s 2026 horizon report frames the shift with the right analogy: robotics is following the trajectory of computers, from single-function devices to general platforms.