#25 The Chinese Robot Dogs the US Just Banned
A Chinese robot dog sold to American universities shipped with a hidden door built into it. The federal government has a catalog number for that door, and this week it finally shut the imports off.
***
On July seventeenth, the FAA gave Boeing back the authority to sign off its own airplanes. Ten days later it ordered four hundred and fifty three of them inspected, because the passenger seats might not be attached to the floor.
***
A black hole in the wrong part of the sky tore a star apart, and not one human being noticed. A piece of software did. Three stories about who is doing the checking.
***
On Tuesday, the United States banned new imports of humanoid and quadruped robots from foreign manufacturers. The government called them an unacceptable risk to national security. The ban covers power converters too, the boxes that tie batteries and renewable generation into the electric grid.
***
China supplies about ninety percent of the humanoid robots sold on this planet. Last year the United States was their biggest overseas customer. This is not a small door closing.
***
Beijing responded the way Beijing always responds. Their foreign ministry spokeswoman said the United States is abusing the concept of national security to suppress Chinese companies. She said protectionism will not make America more competitive, it will only hurt American businesses and consumers. She said China will take necessary measures.
***
Protectionism.
***
Here is what actually happened. This is not a guess. It is not a trade dispute. There is a case number.
***
Unitree is a Chinese robotics company out of Hangzhou. One of their products is the Go One, a robot dog. You have seen these. They get bought by universities, by research labs, by police departments, by anybody who wants a walking platform with cameras on it.
***
In March of twenty twenty five, security researchers pulled one apart.
***
Inside the firmware they found a service the customer was never told about. It started itself every time the machine powered on. It opened a tunnel to a cloud service operated out of China. Anybody holding a valid key could reach through that tunnel and take the robot over. Live camera. Live movement. Full remote control, from anywhere in the world, on a machine sitting in an American building.
***
That is not a bug. A bug is a mistake. This was software that was written on purpose, shipped on purpose, and left out of the documentation on purpose.
***
The federal government keeps a public database of security flaws. This one is in it. The classification on it is called Hidden Functionality. That is the government's own words. It means somebody built it in on purpose.
***
Unitree's explanation was that it was leftover code from development.
***
They invalidated the key two days after the researchers went public. Researchers pointed out that a company that can invalidate a key can also issue a new one.
***
The researchers went looking for these units. They found them running inside MIT. Princeton. Carnegie Mellon. The University of Waterloo up in Canada.
***
Those are schools where American defense research gets done. Those are where the graduate students who build our next generation of hardware are sitting right now. And the machine in the room has a camera, a microphone, and a tunnel home.
***
Nobody bought it as an act of espionage. It was a good robot at a good price and the purchase order went through. It does not come in through the fence. It comes in through procurement.
***
Six months later, a group of researchers disclosed a second problem in Unitree hardware. They called it Uni-Pown.
***
Different attack. This one comes in over Bluetooth. No key required. No account required. You get inside radio range and you take root, which means total control of the machine, the highest level there is. It works on the Go Two dog, and it works on the humanoids.
***
A compromised robot can go find the next robot and do it to that one. Machine to machine, without a person touching anything. The engineering press called it the first major public exploit of a commercial humanoid platform.
***
Unitree said they had started addressing it.
***
The mechanism the government used this week is called the Covered List. That is the same list they built to keep Huawei out of American telecommunications. Once your equipment lands on it, the FCC will not authorize it, and if it cannot be authorized, it cannot be legally sold here.
***
In December they used it on drones and cut the largest Chinese drone maker out of the American market. Before that, the same national security argument was used to keep Chinese electric vehicles off American roads.
***
Telecom. Drones. Cars. Now robots and grid converters.
***
Four different products. One argument, over and over. And every time, the same answer comes back from Beijing about protectionism. Four times is not a coincidence.
***
We did not handle it.
***
The ban only stops new models. Robots that already have authorization can keep being sold. Everything already deployed stays deployed. The units in those universities are not going anywhere, and there is no order in this to go collect them.
***
The federal government exempted itself. Washington can keep buying and using these machines.
***
And we are not banning them because we have something better. Tesla and Figure have both had trouble getting humanoids into real mass production. Of the ten strongest humanoid startups in the world measured by patent strength, six are Chinese, and the Chinese ones hold the top five spots. There are more than a hundred and forty humanoid manufacturers in China. There are not a hundred and forty anywhere else.
***
A month ago, Nvidia announced a research partnership with Unitree. That same month, the American government flagged Unitree as a security risk with ties to the Chinese military and barred it from Defense Department contracts. Same company. Same month. One agency partnering, another agency blacklisting. That is not a strategy. We have not made up our mind.
***
Last month, at a laboratory in Hefei, China finished a magnet.
***
Five hundred and eighty two tons. Twenty one meters long. It is the largest superconducting magnet ever built for a fusion reactor, with more than three times the stored energy of the equivalent piece on the international project in France, the one thirty five countries have been building together for decades.
***
The size is not the point.
***
The point is that the specialty steel was made in China. The insulation was made in China. The superconducting wire was made in China. Every component of the largest magnet of its kind on Earth came out of their own supply chain, and their institute director said so out loud, because that was the achievement he wanted credit for.
***
Export controls work on a country that has to buy something.
***
You cannot cut off a country that makes all of it itself.
***
Beijing calls this protectionism. Protectionism is when you put a tariff on somebody because their product is cheaper than yours and you would rather not compete. That is not this.
***
This is a company that put a hidden door in a machine, sold that machine to American universities, and left the door open. The door is in the government's own database. The classification on it says hidden functionality. Then a second way in turned up, one that spreads from machine to machine on its own.
***
You do not get to install a way into somebody's building and then call it unfair when they change the locks.
***
This ban is not a win. We stopped making these things. China made them instead. We bought them because they were cheaper.
***
We closed our market to them.
***
They can still make everything. We cannot. Closing a door does not change that. The only fix is building it here. Nobody has shown me that plan.
***
On July seventeenth, the Federal Aviation Administration announced it was giving Boeing back the authority to sign off its own airplanes. Effective the twentieth. That is the final certificate, the piece of paper that says this aircraft matches its approved design and is safe to fly, issued at the end of the line before the jet goes to the airline.
***
The FAA took that authority away in twenty nineteen, after a seven thirty seven MAX went into the Java Sea, and another one went into the ground outside Addis Ababa, and three hundred and forty six people died. They took it away on the seven eighty seven too, in twenty twenty two, over production quality. Boeing spent seven years without it.
***
The administrator said safety drives everything they do, and that this step was only possible because they were confident it could be done safely. The agency said that over the previous eight months, when Boeing issued the certificates and when the FAA issued the certificates, the findings came out comparable.
***
That was July seventeenth.
***
On July twenty seventh, ten days later, the FAA proposed an order on four hundred and fifty three seven thirty seven MAX jets registered in the United States.
***
Because the seats might not be bolted to the floor.
***
The passenger seats in that airplane do not sit on the floor. They lock into tracks that run the length of the cabin. At the back of each seat assembly there is a fitting with what is called a shear plunger, and that plunger has to be lowered down into the track and engaged. That is what holds the seat to the airplane.
***
The FAA's language is that the aft fitting shear plungers were not correctly lowered and not engaged in the seat tracks.
***
In plain English, somebody set the seat in place and never dropped the pin.
***
What happens if you do not is in the order too. Under increased load, in turbulence, or in an emergency landing, the seat assembly can come out of the track. The agency says a seat that comes loose can injure the people in it and the people around it, and it can end up in the aisle and slow down an evacuation.
***
That is the part that would keep me up. Not the seat. The aisle. In an evacuation you have ninety seconds and one path.
***
Up to sixty nine seat assemblies per airplane need looking at. Across the fleet that is more than eighty thousand seats. United has about two hundred and eighty four of the affected jets. Southwest has over two hundred and sixty.
***
Eighty five dollars.
***
That is what the FAA estimates it costs to inspect one seat assembly. If it is wrong, it costs another eighty five dollars to fix it.
***
Add up every affected airplane in the country and the total comes to two million, six hundred fifty six thousand, eight hundred and forty five dollars. Two point six million. For the entire American fleet.
***
Boeing told the FAA that some or all of it may be covered under warranty.
***
On Tuesday, Boeing's stock went up five percent on an earnings report.
***
Now the part nobody else is reporting.
***
The FAA did not find this. Boeing found this.
***
The proposed order cites its source document. It is a Boeing service bulletin, and it carries a date. December tenth, twenty twenty five.
***
Boeing identified the problem on their own airplanes, wrote it up, and put a date on it in December.
***
The federal order telling airlines to go look came out on July twenty seventh. Seven and a half months later.
***
Now line that up against the other timeline, because they are the same timeline. The FAA said its decision to hand back certification authority came after eight months of watching Boeing's production quality and finding it comparable to their own.
***
Eight months of review. The bulletin about seats not attached to the floor is dated inside that window.
***
They were grading Boeing's quality system during the exact stretch when Boeing was documenting this. On the seventeenth, they handed the pen back. Ten days later, they ordered the inspections.
***
On an assembly line, a step like seating those plungers is not a suggestion. It is written into the job. Somebody performs it, and somebody buys it off, and that buy-off is a name attached to a claim that the work got done right.
***
Which means one of three things happened here. The step got skipped and signed anyway. The step got inspected by somebody who could not actually see whether the plunger was seated. Or the process itself never made anybody verify it in the first place.
***
None of those three are an accident. All three are a system.
***
The people at the top of that company do not get paid for quality. They get paid for delivery. Shareholders want the profit. Executives want the bonus. You get both by putting airplanes out the door. Every day a jet sits on the line is money. Every inspection that stops the line is money. Everybody in that building knows it, and the pressure runs downhill.
***
Nobody sends a memo saying skip the check. They do not have to. You set the schedule, you set the bonus against the schedule, and the checks get skipped on their own.
***
Then it gets found in December, and the order comes out in July.
***
And in between, the regulator decided Boeing could sign its own airplanes again.
***
Now what this is not. Nothing is grounded. This is a proposed directive with a comment period running to September tenth. It is not an emergency. Nobody is saying these airplanes are unsafe to fly today.
***
And eighty five dollars a seat is nothing. This is a cheap fix. That is exactly what makes it worse. Nobody delayed this to save money, because there was no money to save. It sat because nobody's bonus depended on it.
***
Seven years ago, the FAA took away Boeing's ability to sign off its own airplanes, because three hundred and forty six people were dead. Ten days ago, they gave it back. Ten days after that, they had to order four hundred and fifty three airplanes inspected for seats that might come out of the floor.
***
I do not think anybody at Boeing wants to hurt anyone. I have never thought that. That was never the problem.
***
Speed pays. Stopping costs. The system does what it was built to do, and everybody's signature is on the paperwork.
***
A black hole a million times heavier than the sun tore a star apart last November. It happened about seven hundred and fifty million light years from here. For a few months, the flare outshone its entire galaxy in ultraviolet light, putting out roughly what ten billion suns put out.
***
Nobody saw it. A piece of software did.
***
There is a telescope on Palomar Mountain in southern California that photographs the entire northern sky every two nights. Anything that changes brightness between one pass and the next gets logged as a flash. Roughly half a million flashes a night.
***
No person reads that. No team of people reads that. The pile is too big, and it refills every night before anyone could finish the last one.
***
So the astronomers wrote a program to sort it. The program was built to recognize one specific pattern of light. That pattern happens when a star drifts close enough to a black hole that the black hole's gravity pulls harder on the near side of the star than the far side, and the star comes apart. The debris spirals in, heats up, and puts out an enormous amount of light for a few months.
***
Surveys catch about thirty of those a year. The program flagged one in November of twenty twenty five.
***
Then the humans went to work. A telescope in Chile broke the light apart into its component wavelengths, and the pattern matched. A NASA satellite looked at it in ultraviolet, where ground telescopes cannot see, and measured the temperature at about fifty four thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Everything checked out. It was a star being eaten.
***
And the black hole was in the wrong place.
***
Supermassive black holes live at the centers of galaxies. That is where they form, that is where they stay, and that is where every one of these star shredding events had ever been found. This one was thirty thousand light years out from the center, in the outskirts, where a black hole that size has no business being. Nothing like it had ever been seen that far from a galactic core.
***
Astronomers have theorized about these for years. They call them wandering black holes, or orphans. The idea is that when galaxies collide and merge, the black holes at their centers end up in a gravitational fight, and sometimes the smallest one gets thrown out. It ends up drifting in the dark, nowhere near the middle of anything.
***
There is a second possibility for this one. A smaller dwarf galaxy may be getting swallowed by the larger one right now, and what looks like a black hole out in the outskirts is really the old center of that smaller galaxy being eaten. Either way, it started at the heart of something, and it is not there anymore.
***
The problem with finding one is that a black hole sitting alone in empty space emits nothing. There is no light. There is nothing to see. The only way you ever learn it is there is if something wanders close enough for it to eat, and that almost never happens out where there are barely any stars. They were invisible, and they stayed theoretical.
***
So why did this one finally get caught?
***
It is not that the telescopes were too small. That telescope had been photographing that patch of sky for years. The reason is that people looked at galaxy centers, because that is where black holes are, because that is where they have always been. It was a completely reasonable assumption, and it was correct almost every time.
***
The software did not have the assumption. It was told to look for a shape of light, not a location. It found that shape in a place a person would have skipped. The lead researcher said it plainly. Out of the half million flashes the survey catches every night, the program recognized one that looked right, despite the unusual location.
***
That is the whole discovery.
***
This is not the only time this has happened.
***
A few years back, astronomers turned machine learning loose on a set of sky surveys, looking for places where a massive object bends the light of something behind it. They found twelve hundred and ten new ones. That roughly doubled the total number known to science, from all of history, in one pass through data that had already been collected.
***
The data was already there. The findings were already in it. Nobody had gotten through the pile.
***
And that pattern is about to get much bigger. There is a new observatory running in Chile right now, and a new space telescope going up after it. Between them, astronomers expect to go from finding a few dozen of these star shredding events a year to finding hundreds, or thousands, at much greater distances, looking back through nine billion years.
***
Nobody is going to hand sort that. It is not a question of hiring more graduate students. The volume is past the point where human review is even an option.
***
The program is not a tool that helps with the discovery. The program is the discovery. Whatever it flags gets studied. Whatever it does not flag does not exist, as far as anyone will ever know.
***
The machine had no habits. It found something where people had stopped looking. That cuts both ways.
***
These programs are trained on what we have already seen. That is what training is. You feed the thing thousands of examples of the pattern you want, and it learns to recognize things that resemble them. It worked here because location was never part of what it was matching on. It was matching on the shape of the light.
***
Something new, something that does not look like anything it was trained on, does not get flagged. The system did not break. It worked the way it was built. It sorted the pile and threw that one out. The pile is half a million deep and it refills tomorrow night.
***
Nobody finds out. There is no error message for a thing you never knew to look for.
***
For four hundred years, the limit on astronomy was the instrument. Better glass, bigger mirror, see farther. Everything from Galileo to Hubble runs on that one idea.
***
That is over. The instruments now collect more than anyone can look at. The limit moved.
***
The limit is the filter. It is whatever code decides which half million things get thrown away tonight, and which three get a human being's attention. A small number of people wrote that code. What they assumed is now the edge of what anybody can find.
***
Nobody handed them that power on purpose. The data got big and it landed there.
***
Three stories tonight, and the same hole runs through all three. A Chinese company shipped a door into American universities. Our government did not find it. Outside researchers did. The ban came years after the door was cataloged. The FAA spent eight months checking Boeing's quality, handed Boeing back the authority to sign its own airplanes, and ten days later ordered four hundred and fifty three of them inspected. For a defect Boeing wrote up in December. And on that mountain in California, a program nobody reviews decides every night which half million things get thrown away.
***
We did not stop checking on purpose. We handed the checking to whoever was closest to the work, and then we stopped asking. Every one of these got caught by somebody outside the system who went looking anyway. That is not oversight. That is luck. And luck is not a plan.
***
AND THAT'S IT.
***
That is everyone knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
***
I am Brian Bullock of starborn studios. Find me on X at Everyoneknows1. If this hits you share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe. leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com
***
Because everyone knows. Your silence is your consent