Japan Chose Chinese Humanoid Robots for Its Airport. The Robots Keep Sending Data to China.
When Japan Airlines ground crew at Tokyo Haneda loads your bags onto a plane starting next month, two workers doing the heavy lifting will be Unitree G1 humanoid robots — and they will be sending data back to China every five minutes while they work.
JAL confirmed Monday it is deploying two Unitree G1 robots at Haneda, which handles more than 60 million passengers a year, in a trial running from May 2026 through 2028. The robots, manufactured by Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics, will transport containers and open and close the levers that secure them to aircraft. The company has separately announced plans to use them for cabin cleaning.
The announcement is framed as a response to Japan labor crunch: a record 42.7 million tourists visited last year, the working-age population is shrinking, and JAL employs roughly 4,000 ground handlers doing physically demanding work in tight spaces around aircraft.
But the deeper story is the one JAL is not advertising: the robots it chose for a role in critical airport infrastructure have documented security vulnerabilities and are built by a company whose investors include Tencent, Alibaba, China Mobile, and multiple Beijing state-linked investment funds.
Security researchers disclosed in September 2025 that the Unitree G1 sends operational and sensor data to servers in China every five minutes without notifying the operator. Separately they identified UniPwn, a flaw in hardcoded Bluetooth encryption shared across all Unitree devices, allowing root-level wireless access. A single compromised robot could in theory be used to compromise others nearby.
Markis told IEEE Spectrum the communication from Unitree regarding these findings was unsatisfactory. Both answers are equally bad, he said, referring to whether the vulnerabilities were intentional or negligent.
Unitree Series C round in June 2025 included Tencent, Alibaba, Meituan, China Mobile, Sequoia China, Shenzhen Capital Group, Source Code Capital, and the China Internet Investment Fund, which the Chinese government established to promote national strategic industries.
JAL partner GMO AI Robotics Trading is a unit of GMO Internet Group, a company best known for web hosting. GMO declared 2026 the First Year of Humanoids and opened a humanoid lab in Shibuya on April 7, less than three weeks before the JAL trial was announced. At Japan iREX in December 2025, GMO displayed Unitree G1 robots as robotic labor dispatch.
Japan gave the world ASIMO, robot hotels, and six of the top 10 industrial robot makers. At iREX 2025 those same giants showed robotic arms at their booths. Not a single humanoid. Japan ceded that market.
The operational data streaming from Haneda tarmac has intelligence value. If the G1 is transmitting sensor data to Chinese servers every five minutes, that data accumulates in China regardless of what JAL contract says about ownership.
Japan choice reflects a genuine dilemma: it needs labor, its domestic robotics industry has no commercial humanoid to offer, and the Chinese vendors who do come with documented security risks and Beijing-aligned investment. The alternative is a labor gap in critical aviation infrastructure.
For now JAL is calling it a trial. Two robots, three-year window, a web hosting company as integrator, two to three hours battery life before recharge. The framing is modest. But the dependency being built may not be.
If the Haneda trial produces the data its backers hope, other aging democracies — South Korea, Italy, parts of continental Europe — will be watching. The model is exportable. The question is what comes with it.