Assembling a robot in America doesn’t make it an American robot. Sen. Dave McCormick says the motors and magnets inside still come from China.

China installed 54% of the world’s new industrial robots in 2024. That’s more than every other country combined. A decade ago China imported nearly three-quarters of its robots. Now it builds most of them itself . The state has also put up a fund meant to draw nearly $138 billion into robotics and other advanced industries over the next two decades. In July the FCC added advanced robots from foreign adversaries to a national-security blocklist, a step aimed squarely at China.

American companies still lead in the software, the models you type into. However, they don’t lead in physical AI, the robots and systems that make products and move goods. Those machines almost always get built somewhere else.

I asked Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) what to do about it. He starts with a complaint about where robotics sits in Washington. “If we treat robotics as a footnote to AI policy, we miss the fact that this is fundamentally an industrial competition, not just a technology competition,” he says. Robotics, as he describes it, “is about the physical infrastructure that turns intelligence into action,” and he lists “the motors, the manufacturing lines, the supply chains, the workforce that builds and operates these machines.”

Being ahead in software counts for less than it looks if a rival builds the machines that act on it. The deeper problem, in his telling, isn’t the robots. It’s what’s inside them.

Why Robotics Needs Its Own Strategy

His National Commission on Robotics Act would create a federal body focused only on robotics. Software scales by copying. A robot has to be sourced, built, powered and maintained, which is an industrial capability a country either has or doesn’t. China worked that out years ago.

America’s gap isn’t the one you’d expect. “The single greatest gap America has to close isn’t a technology gap,” he says, “it’s a coordination and deployment gap.” He explains: “We have the best research institutions in the world and Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute alone proves that. What we don’t have is a federal strategy that connects that research to domestic manufacturing capacity, workforce pipelines, and public and private investment in a coordinated way.”

Start with the magnets. China makes 94% of the world’s rare-earth magnets , the small, powerful ones inside robot motors, electric vehicles, wind turbines and guided weapons. The dependency deepens the further down the chain you look. China mines 60% of the raw material, refines 91% of it, and makes 94% of the finished magnets.

So a robot can be American in name and Chinese in every part that moves. Putting it together here doesn’t fix that. It hides it.

“A robot assembled on American soil with Chinese-sourced motors, actuators, and rare-earth magnets doesn’t actually solve the strategic problem,” McCormick says. “It just moves the last step of the supply chain onto U.S. soil while leaving us dependent on a foreign supplier for everything underneath it. That’s exposure, not resilience.” Ignore the components, he adds, and “our robotics ecosystem becomes a house of cards.”

This stopped being theoretical in 2025. China restricted exports of several rare-earth elements and the magnets made from them, and within weeks automakers in the United States and Europe couldn’t source what they needed . Some cut output. A wider round of controls followed that October, then got suspended for twelve months. The suspension runs out this fall.

The obvious objection is the cost. Full self-sufficiency is expensive, and maybe unnecessary when supply chains shared with allies could buy the same security for less. McCormick doesn’t argue for going it alone. He wants Washington to map where the dependencies actually sit, then put targeted incentives behind “domestic and allied-nation capacity” in those specific choke points. It’s a cheaper bet than self-sufficiency, and, he says, the part “people miss most often.”

Making America The First Customer

Even when a company wants to build in the United States, it hits what founders call the “valley of death,” the long climb from a working prototype to a production line. McCormick’s first move is demand. “The most immediate thing the federal government can do is make itself a reliable early customer,” he says. Federal procurement, he argues, “should absolutely be used to create early demand for American-made robotics, particularly through the Department of Defense,” which gives domestic manufacturers “the order book they need to justify scaling up production here rather than overseas.”

He’d pair that with money at the front end. By his own description he’s a “free-market capitalist” who is “innately skeptical of government-directed investment,” but he makes an exception where national security is at stake. There he’d have Washington put up early capital and take a “capped-upside, first-loss position.” The government absorbs the first losses if a bet fails and caps its own gains if it works, so private money follows. Robotics, he says, “would fall within the bucket of critical sectors deserving of Washington’s support.”

Where that lands is partly geography, and Pittsburgh is the case he keeps returning to. The city has a robotics research base anchored at Carnegie Mellon, and he wants the companies coming out of that work to scale there rather than somewhere else. That comes down to making it easy to build, because “capital and talent flow like water and they will follow the path of least resistance.” His answer is permitting reform , which in practice means cutting the years of federal review that sit between a signed lease and a working factory.

Building robots at home runs into a limit the software story skips. Factories need power, and the same grid is feeding the data centers that train and run AI. When the two compete, the bill can land on households . McCormick’s position is that whoever creates the demand pays for it. Data-center developers, he says, “should never offload costs onto ratepayers,” and “must pay for the power they need,” through their own tariffs or their own on-site generation. Robots made in Pennsylvania still need power Pennsylvania can spare.

The other limit is public patience. In his Manhattan Institute remarks , McCormick warned against repeating the mistakes of globalization, pointing to his own hometown of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, where the Magee carpet mill employed 2,000 people before the jobs left. The worry now is automation doing the same to factory and warehouse work.

He’s careful not to overclaim. It’s unclear, he says, how AI will reshape the workforce, and he points to a study of more than 21,000 companies where the heaviest AI spenders kept employment about 10% higher than similar firms that hadn’t yet adopted it. He commits to two things. “AI is creating hundreds of thousands of blue collar jobs,” he says, and “people can’t expect that the work they do now will look the same when they retire.”

His answer is preparation over resignation. Wider access to short-term training and continuing education, and employers who use AI “as a force multiplier for people, not a replacement.” It’s the softest part of the agenda, and the most load-bearing, because a robotics boom that leaves workers behind loses the public support the whole thing runs on.

McCormick measures success less by the number of robots than by the kind of country the effort produces. He wants America to stay at the frontier, and he wants “the wealth generated by AI to be widely owned across society.” What stands in the way, in his telling, is temperament rather than policy: “the four horsemen of decline: cynicism, incrementalism, pettiness, and divisiveness. These are infectious and dangerously popular these days.”

Strip the politics away and the argument is simple. The next industrial era will run on machines that act in the physical world. Whoever builds those machines, and the parts inside them, sets the terms for whoever buys them. A country can lead in the intelligence and still end up having to rent the muscle.

Which is why the answer turns up in places rather than in policy papers. Pittsburgh made the steel for the last industrial era and then lost most of the jobs that came with it. The mills that remain sit alongside a research base the city spent decades building. McCormick’s bet is that it gets a second turn, and that this time the country keeps what it builds.

Disclosure: The author is the CEO of Carnegie Foundry, a Pittsburgh robotics venture studio whose portfolio companies could benefit from these policies. Neither the senator nor his office had editorial control over this article.