So a couple weeks ago the FCC dropped a National Security Determination and I had to go home, make popcorn, open the last of the random rosé I had (truly an event for a gin drinker), and watch the robotics zeitgeist have a complete meltdown. Oh, dear reader, I have not hate-scrolled the socials like this since Kendrick nuked Drake.

For those of you who have thus far escaped the drama, the Trump administration dropped this doc on 27-Jul that puts mobile robots and power inverters on the FCC Covered List, putting them into the same regulatory category as Huawei and ZTE. The scoping turned out pretty sensible, excluding anchored robotic fixtures, medical devices, and drones (which are covered separately by the FAA). There’s a Conditional Approvals path for foreign manufacturers to demonstrate provenance and gain exceptions.

And then the entire robotics takes-having industry lost their fucking minds. They’re killing American innovation! They’re trying to screw over China! HIDE YOUR CHILDREN, THEY’RE BANNING YOUR ROOMBAS

Granted, the committee that drafted this document did not cover themselves in editorial glory; the lack of care in its writing certainly doesn’t lend itself to credibility, but the core is sound. The only good analysis has been from my favorite technology hot take podcast ChinaTalk, where they go in depth on the intent and how the FCC mechanisms work. Particularly noteworthy is the insight that the FCC Covered List actually makes a LOT of sense for regulating emerging technologies with shorter expected operational lives.

So let’s get into why everyone really freaked out: the NSD called out actual sins of the industry. Here’s a few:

• February 2026: a security researcher found a vulnerability that gave him remote access to 7,000 home robots simultaneously — live camera feeds, microphone audio, and detailed maps of consumers’ homes.
• September 2025: an exploit allowed a remote actor to take over entire fleets of Unitree robots.
• April 2025: security researchers found a potentially pre-installed backdoor in Chinese robot quadrupeds providing access to the camera feed and full remote control of the device.

Documented incidents in named publications with verified sources demonstrate a trend of very real industry behavioral problems. No one in the administration made this shit up to punish China or go after Unitree or some other nonsense. Pairing the robotics and power inverters actions in the same NSD makes it clear that this isn’t about geopolitical maneuvering; it’s genuinely going after long-standing InfoSec/InfraSec concerns. The Big Bad Government read the news, extrapolated appropriately, and did their freakin’ jobs.

Chat, regulations are written in blood. The pattern’s the same every time: an industry wings it on their own for a while, generally with the best of intentions, sometimes making mistakes but building up a body of common best practice knowledge. A subset of profiteers then cuts corners in the name of time-to-market or competitive pricing or straight-up sloth, and people start getting hurt. Eventually, enough people get harmed, maimed, or killed that an uproar finally forces action. This is how we got damn near every executive agency, from the FDA to the EPA to OSHA to CISA, because a single mere mortal cannot possibly perform enough due diligence on everything that we touch and consume to correctly judge the risk levels. And even when they could, incentives like “needing to pay rent” can force people into situations where they have no real choice.

Which tells you exactly how to read the reactions. Anyone who read and understood the NSD but howled anyway probably is not thinking about safety and security the way someone who makes equipment that can harm, maim, or kill ought to. Regulations and standards accelerate organizations doing the right work because they provide a roadmap on best practices and a ready-made guide to what “good” actually looks like. These organizations welcome scrutiny because they know it’ll only make them better.

The screamers fear scrutiny because they either don’t know about or haven’t bothered to identify the gaps between what they’ve produced and what good is. The ignorance is fixable, and regulatory requirements before you can go to market help do so significantly. The ones who don’t bother are the scariest, happiest when they can push any and every cost onto everyone else around them no matter the consequences.

Those latter ones can be prevalent in any industry with messianic hype complexes[1]. We are absolutely infested with amoral longtermists who aren’t afraid to shed our blood today for their benefit tomorrow. Regulation like the FCC Covered List stops these fuckers from making it everyone else’s problem.

So a couple things for the to-do list from here:

1. Go back and read the NSD again because it’s telling you what good looks like: supply chain provenance, software integrity, decision-making safeguards, and responsible data handling. Your Product people should just write goals and requirements against those right now. It’s a gift.
2. We know how to demonstrate what good looks like, so let’s get it into real regulatory policy outside of an NSD memo intended as a stopgap. Our industry needs to stop waiting for spankings and lawsuits and build our own proposal to put into US Code. Modeling how Title 21 sets cGxP for pharmaceutical manufacturers with appropriate tiering for the levels of risk, and governed by CISA which has the analytical capabilities to assess it, provides clear public guidance so that we all know what the bar is and how to hit it.

Stop barking and get to work.

[1] – see Move Fast and Break Accountability for more on how we keep ending up here.