Executive Summary

This report examines China’s embrace of embodied AI—artificial intelligence integrated with physical systems (robots, drones, vehicles, etc.)—as a critical pathway toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).

In the United States and Europe, large language models (LLMs) and their multimodal variants are regarded by many AI scientists and major AI companies as the most promising path to AGI, despite known issues with abstraction and reasoning.

By contrast, in China there is a broader vision of how AGI can be achieved, most recently expressed in a nationwide move toward AI embodiment—namely, intelligence developed through interaction between body, brain, and environment, in both physical and virtual forms.

This trend toward embodied AI is backed by policy support at the national and local government levels, which has led to large embodied AI innovation centers linked to top universities and tech firms being established in coastal cities and provinces.

The upshot is China is on a path to accomplish two goals simultaneously: enriching the nation by integrating AI into the economy and achieving AGI that is more aligned with the totality of human expression.

The report recommends that the United States and its allies ramp up their monitoring of China’s AI progress, benchmark its claims, and consider broader approaches to AGI beyond scaling up LLMs.