Humanoid Robots: 1,584 Patent Applications from China, 113 from the USA

In the first half of 2026, the five major patent offices recorded 1,584 patents for humanoid robots from China, 113 from the USA, and 35 from South Korea. The figures became known on September 28 through an inquiry in the South Korean parliament. China's share of the global stock thus rose to 60.8 percent, up from 51.8 percent in 2024, while the USA fell from 27.3 to 21.8 percent.

Europe, Japan, and all other countries combined account for the remaining 12.8 percent. Patents say nothing about who builds the better robot. They say something about who can later demand licenses and sue components out of the market. And because applications are published only eighteen months after filing, the gap today is larger than the table suggests.

The disparity is most striking in Robot Foundation Models—those large language models that teach a robot perception and movement in one go. Chinese applicants hold 66.3 percent of patents in the five offices, the USA comes in at 14.1 percent, and South Korea at 8.8 percent. Precisely the part of the technology that has gained the most momentum in the last two years is distributed most one-sidedly.

The survey was intended as a wake-up call for Seoul, not as a snapshot for the rest of the world. The Korea Institute of S&T Evaluation and Planning regularly assesses the standing of individual countries with the USA as the benchmark of one hundred points. In autonomous manipulation, China climbed from 79 to 90 points between 2022 and 2024, while South Korea fell from 85 to 80 points. The same picture emerges in human-robot interaction. Congressman Lee Jeong-heon therefore calls for a restructuring of government research funding and warns of a gap that can no longer be closed.

However, quantity is not the same as impact. An analysis of the patent landscape by industry service IAM shows that US applicants hold only around five percent of active patent families for robot construction, but about eleven percent of weighted portfolio strength. An American patent thus weighs on average about twice as much as the number of pieces would suggest. Chinese applications contain many variants of the same idea. However, anyone who concludes from this that it is merely statistical maintenance underestimates how much negotiating power even mediocre intellectual property rights provide in aggregate. In court, in the end, whoever got there first counts.

From Europe, practically only one name appears in these rankings. Agile Robots from Munich ranks among the ten strongest specialized robotics companies by portfolio strength. Otherwise, the continent is a peripheral district in this statistic, and that is remarkable for a region that has regarded mechanical engineering as core business for a hundred years.

The finding is particularly skewed for Switzerland because the country otherwise does everything right when it comes to patenting. 9,914 European patent applications came from Switzerland in 2025, ranking seventh worldwide and third in Europe, and on a per capita basis, Switzerland is uncontested at the top with 1,096 applications per million inhabitants. Zurich ranks thirteenth among European regions, Vaud eighteenth, Zug nineteenth. Only the strength lies in medical technology, pharmaceuticals, and specialized machinery. With the humanoid as a whole, with joint architecture, whole-body control, and language models, Swiss applicants barely participate.

This does not have to be a mistake. ANYbotics, mimic, or Hexagon do not build the complete humanoid robot but rather parts of it in which they belong to the world elite, and they file patents there. This calculation works out as long as no one blocks the route. How quickly that can happen is just being demonstrated by Universal Robots: The Danish parent company Teradyne sued Chinese manufacturer JAKA before the Unified Patent Court on August 27 after taking apart a purchased robot arm and comparing it with its own intellectual property rights. A judgment would take effect in 17 EU states. Such proceedings work in both directions, and the other side now has significantly more ammunition in its arsenal.

That leaves the question of what the figures practically mean for a Swiss supplier. Probably this: A freedom-to-operate assessment, once a formality shortly before production, belongs at the beginning of development for components for humanoids. Otherwise, you end up with a finished gearbox on the shelf that cannot be sold anywhere in Europe. The answer to the question whose patent you are infringing on will very likely be in Chinese.