IDC: American humanoid robot makers face a 2028 squeeze under FCC robot ban

FCC ruling and robots in America

If you make humanoid robots and want to sell them in America, the most valuable thing you own right now might be an FCC certificate you got before July 28.

That's the clearest takeaway from new IDC research on the FCC's foreign robot rule. Under the rule, foreign-produced advanced robotic devices can no longer get new equipment authorization in the U.S. But models that were already certified keep shipping, and their software and firmware updates are waived through at least January 1, 2029.

So the question for every humanoid company isn't really where its factory is.

It's how old its product is.

"Your exposure depends more on your product cycle and installed base than on the flag over your factory," IDC analysts Navkendar Singh and Ryan Reith write.

Humanoid robot makers hit hardest

That's bad news for humanoids specifically. 

Robot vacuum brands have years of certified models they can keep tweaking. Humanoid makers, by contrast, ship new models faster than anyone else in robotics, so there's almost no certified backlog to lean on. A few did get there in time: AgiBot's A2 Ultra, for example, already carries FCC certification alongside CE and others. But a humanoid launched next year with new joints, new hands, or a new compute module needs fresh authorization it can't get.

The result, per IDC's model: U.S. humanoid revenue lands 41% below the pre-rule baseline in 2027 and 58% below in 2030. Household cleaning robots sit at just 4% and 18% below over the same years.

The humanoid market is changing

What makes this interesting is that the humanoid market is changing shape at the same time. In 2025, about 84% of humanoid shipments went to what IDC calls display and validation: research labs, education, performances, and government data collection. By the first half of 2026, that dropped to about 70%, and real-world work nearly doubled to about 30%.

In other words, humanoids are just starting to get real jobs. And the next generation of models built for those jobs is exactly what the rule blocks.

Buyers are still cautious, too. 

About 30% of organizations prioritize autonomous mobile robots in their planned robotics investments, according to IDC, versus about 16% for humanoids. IDC's advice to enterprise buyers is to benchmark humanoid use cases against AMRs and fixed arms on total cost of ownership. Fixed industrial arms, notably, aren't covered by the rule at all.

Then there's the calendar.

Three deadlines pile up in roughly a 12-month window:

• January 1, 2028: applications due for the FCC's Conditional Approval pathway, which lets foreign vendors keep selling new models if they move production to the U.S.
• December 2027 to August 2028: Europe's high-risk AI obligations under the AI Act phase in.
• End of 2028: when IDC expects U.S. humanoid builders like Figure and Apptronik to reach scaled production.

That last one is the catch. Until American builders are shipping at scale, there's no domestic volume to replace what the rule keeps out. And even those builders still rely on China for motors, actuators, batteries, and rare-earth materials, IDC says. The rule covers the finished robot, not the parts inside it.

Component makers will win?

Which makes component suppliers the quiet winners here, at least potentially.

"You sit at the chokepoint," IDC tells component makers, adding that suppliers who qualify with U.S. humanoid builders in the next 12 to 18 months will be hard to displace.

Meanwhile, China isn't standing still. 

Chinese vendors shipped about 95% of the world's humanoid robots in the first half of 2026, according to IDC, and the U.S. is only about 18% of global robot consumption across the categories IDC modeled. Europe buys more than twice that. IDC expects Chinese makers to redirect volume to the UK, France, Germany, and Eastern Europe, which means the AI Act timeline may soon matter more to Chinese humanoid companies than anything the FCC does.

The big unknown: rule creep. IDC flags pressure to extend the restriction to components or fixed industrial arms. If that happens, the parts that U.S. builders depend on get pulled into the same chokepoint, and the 2028 timeline likely slips.

For now, the humanoid companies with the strongest U.S. position may simply be the ones that filed their paperwork early.

Sources

• IDC: The US Robotics Ban Hits Humanoids Hardest and Sends Volume to Europe
• FCC: Fact sheet on Covered List update for advanced robotic devices
• FCC: Covered List FAQs on robots and inverters
• HumanoidMegaHub: AgiBot A2 Ultra
• Forbes: United States Bans Chinese Humanoid And Quadruped Robots, Citing National Security