The card beats the robot

China now has more than 400 humanoid robot models, over half the world's total, and took nearly 70% of global quadruped sales in the first half of 2026. That is the number the coverage leads with, and it is genuinely the story of an industry moving fast.

The sentence further down matters more for a family. Fourier's own CEO, Gu Jie, names the two reasons these machines are not entering homes yet: safety certification standards that are extremely stringent, and models that cannot generalize past the tasks they were trained on. That is a manufacturer explaining why you should not expect his product in your mother's hallway, which is worth more than any demo.

So the near-term deployment is institutional rather than domestic. And here is the detail that should reframe the whole conversation. Inside those institutions, the most widely adopted safety device in eldercare today is still the positioning alarm card. Not a humanoid. A card.

WAIC did show real progress. The GR-3 can hear "I'm thirsty" and work out the steps to fix it, which is a meaningful leap from scripted demos, and the honest timeline for a machine like that reaching a home is three to five years.

None of which makes the robots fake. It makes them early. A family deciding what to buy this year should read the hurdles section twice and the demo reel once.