Chinese humanoid robots: the consumer map after the import ban

The list of Chinese humanoid robots a Western buyer can put in a cart is short, and on July 28, 2026 it stopped growing. One company, Unitree, sells bipeds to individuals at published USD prices. One more, Booster Robotics, publishes a single price and gates the rest behind a sales form. Everybody else in China's very large humanoid industry sells to labs, factories, and domestic customers, and now faces a US door that only opens for models already through it.

Prices are maker-direct, before shipping and duties.

The list you can actually buy

Robot	Maker	Price (2026-08-07)	Status	What it is
R1-D	Unitree	from $4,290	Listed	Cheapest listed biped
R1	Unitree	from $4,900	In stock	Cheapest with a working checkout
K1	Booster	from $5,999	Listed	Education and developer platform
G1	Unitree	$13,500	Backordered	The mid-range one everyone photographs
H2	Unitree	$29,900	Listed	Research grade
H1	Unitree	$90,000	Listed	The old flagship
H2 Plus	Unitree	$100,000	Listed	Top of the buyable range
T1 / T2	Booster	quote only	T1 "shipping worldwide," per maker	RoboCup and developer platforms

Prices read off shop.unitree.com and booster.tech. Unitree's four-legged Go2 starts at $1,600 and matters here because the US action below covers quadrupeds too.

Two things that table hides. Unitree's own G1 spec page prices it as "US $13.5K (tax and shipping cost excluded)" and adds a line no marketing department enjoys writing: "Individual users are strongly advised to thoroughly understand the limitations of humanoid robots before making a purchase." And Booster's T1 has no public price at all. The store page is a contact form wearing a store's clothes.

One caveat I cannot close for you. Unitree's lineup is priced in USD and sells in the US today, including through the maker's own Amazon storefront. For Booster, I could not confirm which models hold US equipment authorization, which after July 28 stopped being trivia.

What changed on July 28, 2026

The Federal Communications Commission said a White House-convened interagency body had determined that foreign-made "advanced robotic devices," including humanoids and quadrupeds, "pose unacceptable risks to the national security of the United States," citing supply-chain and cybersecurity exposure. The Robot Report's write-up the next day links the FCC's own determination document, which fcc.gov will not serve to an automated fetch, so the specifics below come from that reporting and from Al Jazeera the same day.

For a buyer, four details do all the work:

• It bites on new authorizations, not on your shelf. The ruling does not affect devices already bought or models that already held FCC equipment authorization. Those keep selling.
• Software updates for foreign-supplied systems can be approved with a waiver. So the update path for a machine you own becomes a paperwork question.
• There are exemptions, for federal purchases and for robots granted conditional approval by the Department of War or Homeland Security. Neither route is open to you.
• The FCC calls it country-neutral. Henrik Christensen of UC San Diego told The Robot Report the scope is "potentially much wider than China," with Canadian and European robots possibly caught. Whether that stays theoretical is the thing to watch.

Al Jazeera reported that the Pentagon recently added Unitree to a list of companies it alleges are linked to China's military, and that Beijing denies the characterization. Robert Little, a robotics business-development advisor, put the security case to The Robot Report: researchers "found a backdoor in Unitree robots and later discovered that some models were transmitting data back to servers in China without the owner's knowledge." That is his account, not my testing. It is also the argument that carried the day.

The tier that never crosses the border

China's humanoid sector is far bigger than Unitree, and almost none of it has ever had a Western consumer channel to lose.

Noetix Robotics lists five machines, including the small Bumi, with no prices and no overseas purchase path on the site. EngineAI lists six, from the 138 cm PM01 to the full-size T800, again with no prices. UBTech's English site splits into industrial Walker models sold as enterprise solutions and a small consumer Alpha line, with no prices shown for either. XPeng's IRON is a genuine full-size humanoid, about 5 ft 8 in and 154 lb, and it works inside XPeng's own factory and stores. Mass production is targeted for the end of 2026, retail stores first, broader commercialization from 2027, per June 2026 Reuters reporting.

XPENG says IRON is on track for mass production, bringing the company closer to large-scale humanoid manufacturing by 2026, and calls it a companion built with purpose. (@XPENG_Global, 2025-11-10)

Read that list next to the price table and the shape is clear. The Chinese humanoids Westerners can buy are sold as developer hardware. The ones sold as products are sold in China.

The sticker is not the landed cost

Unitree's product pages quote shipping between $300 and $1,200, and then hand you the rest: "Customer is responsible for all applicable customs duties, taxes, and import clearance in accordance with local regulations." You also need a contactable phone number and email for clearance, and some countries want a tax ID. Fail that and the shipment goes back, with freight charges.

What duty you pay is a moving number in 2026. The state of play, rather than a rate I cannot stand behind: Executive Order 14389, signed February 20, 2026, ended the IEEPA emergency tariffs, including the China ones, and says in its own text that Section 232 and Section 301 duties are untouched. The same day brought Proclamation 11012, a temporary 10 percent import surcharge (with an annex of exceptions), effective February 24, 2026 "for a period of 150 days," which runs it into late July. I found no published extension. Separately, Commerce opened a Section 232 national security investigation into imports of robotics and industrial machinery on September 2, 2025, with no tariff proclamation out of it in the Federal Register as of 2026-08-07. The $800 de minimis exemption is suspended for all countries, which never mattered for a $13,500 robot and does matter for the spare battery.

Budget the shipping, then budget an unknown on top, then decide. Our full price ladder treats every other maker the same way.

Support reality

Unitree publishes a warranty period in the G1 spec table: 8 months on the standard G1, 18 months on the EDU edition. Eight months, on a $13,500 machine, with no described US service network and a return address in Hangzhou. The standard G1 and R1 also "do not support secondary development," so the cheap configuration is the one you cannot reprogram.

That is the strongest argument for the dealer premium. On Amazon, our page-one census found the G1 at $17,990 against $13,500 direct, roughly $4,500 for US logistics and no customs paperwork of your own. That is a real service with a real price, not a scam.

Unitree's own IPO disclosures name the customer. The Robot Report's March 2026 read of the filing, ahead of a roughly $610 million STAR Market listing, puts research and education at 73.6 percent of humanoid revenue for the first nine months of 2025, with 3,551 humanoids sold in that period and the average selling price down from about $85,000 in 2023 to about $25,000. Households are not in that mix. The price cuts are real and aimed at labs.

What I would do

If you want a Chinese biped in the US, buy a model that already holds equipment authorization, and buy it now rather than waiting for the next revision, which is exactly what the July determination blocks. Pay the dealer premium if you want somebody to answer a phone. Outside the US, none of the FCC business applies to you, and the customs paragraph still does.

If what you actually want is a robot that does something in your house, this is the wrong shelf entirely. Start with what exists versus what got demoed, or with the cheapest bipeds you can order if the itch is to own hardware.