Spurred by Donald Trump’s push for industrial reshoring, Chinese robot manufacturers are aiming to enter into the American market.

Produced in large numbers and at relatively low cost by Chinese firms, these industrial robots would first take on menial logistics tasks, potentially paving the way for more advanced humanoid successors.

But this influx of Chinese robots might come with a catch: the harvesting of factories’ sensitive data. So warned a rival American executive, who said this week that high-end industrial robots are able to collect “massive amounts” of data and intellectual property. Daniel Diez, the chief business officer of Agility Robotics, warned that a walking robot equipped with depth-sensitive cameras would pose enough of a privacy risk that American and European buyers might reject them.

“Do you want a walking camera in your facility, filming everything you do, if you don’t trust the manufacturer?” asked Diez, who was speaking in Paris at the VivaTech conference. “I think the biggest problem Chinese manufacturers of these robots are going to have is the level of trust required to deploy these in your facility.”

Another privacy risk arrives before the robots do. Today’s most advanced Western manufacturers use simulated models of their factory floors for purposes that include the training of robots. These models — “digital twins” — are rich in information about the most intricate workings of a factory. The sharing of these models itself poses a privacy risk. “There’s just a lot of sensitive data,” said Diez, “and you have to entrust that to the robot manufacturer in order for these robots to operate in those facilities.”

It is in Agility’s interest, of course, for American manufacturers to prefer domestic robots. But there is plenty of precedent to the suggestion that China is an IP thief. And the easing of the Sino-American trade war, with a deal agreed by Trump and President Xi, could open the door to normalisation of economic relations — and perhaps the importing of industrial robots, of which China is now the world’s biggest producer and consumer.

Prompted by factors including the falling Chinese birth rate, the CCP has invested significant funds and intellectual energy into automating domestic manufacturing. As in the West, data is central to these efforts, with factories depending increasingly on computers that sit at the heart of a network of sensors that are in constant operation. At the same time, China is developing some of the world’s best humanoid robots. This category of robot, which looks much more like us than robot arms and other more specialised equipment, is seen by some as representing the future of industry.

Diez said that it was intelligence, rather than physical capability, that is currently constraining the use of humanoid robots. Interact with a robot that is animated by a large language model and you will find it clunky. Another factor is safety: it takes sophisticated programming to ensure that these strong and heavy robots do not accidentally harm their human colleagues.

Nevertheless, Diez said that we should expect advanced robots to profoundly alter the way we work. “I think we’re at the precipice of a fundamental change in the way we think about labour, and how people are used or deployed to do work, absolutely — across the globe, United States, in Europe, in Asia, any developed economy.”

Perhaps to the relief of Diez’s audience, an Agility robot did not manage, when requested, to place a red t-shirt squarely in a basket — but it had more success with grey and green t-shirts. Whether their rivals come from China or America, human workers can expect some disruption.