Unitree Robotics
Chinese maker of the world's best-selling quadruped and humanoid robots, sold from roughly $1,600, now on the Pentagon's Chinese-military-companies list after its Go2 robot-dogs appeared armed with rifles in PLA drills.
Background
Unitree Robotics, registered as Yushu Technology, was founded in Hangzhou in August 2016 by Wang Xingxing, an engineer born in 1990 who left drone maker DJI after two months to commercialize a low-cost legged robot he had built as a graduate student. The firm undercut Boston Dynamics on price and out-paced it on release cadence, becoming the first company to publicly retail high-performance quadruped robots. Its line spans the Go2 consumer robot dog (from about $1,600), the industrial B2 (roughly $25,000 to $30,000), and humanoids including the H1, the near-$16,000 G1 and the sub-$6,000 R1.
Wang casts Unitree as a civilian hardware company and in 2022 co-signed an industry pledge not to weaponize robots. That posture has eroded. State broadcasters have shown Unitree quadrupeds carrying mounted automatic rifles in a 2024 China-Cambodia exercise and in an April 2026 PLA propaganda video, while the company sits near the center of Beijing's military-civil fusion drive as one of Hangzhou's celebrated 'six little dragons' alongside AI lab DeepSeek. Wang met Xi Jinping at a February 2025 symposium of favored entrepreneurs, and procurement records tie Unitree to defense universities and PLA weapons research, undercutting its no-military-sales claim.