A Chinese physical AI start-up’s brief claim to global dominance in robotics has run into controversy, underscoring the intense US-China competition to develop next-generation artificial intelligence and the challenges of evaluating autonomous systems. In June, Spirit AI, a Hangzhou, Zhejiang province-based firm founded in 2024, briefly overtook United States tech giant Nvidia to take the top spot on RoboArena – a global benchmark for physical AI – with its new Spirit v1.6 model, launched at the...