China’s annual Spring Festival Gala on Lunar New Year’s Eve showcased a stunning robot performance. Two dozen humanoid robots performed advanced martial arts, including the world’s first continuous freestyle table-vaulting parkour, aerial flips, and a 7.5-rotation Airflare grand spin. This marked a big leap from last year’s simple robot dances. The robots came from four firms: Unitree, Magiclab, Galbot, and Noetix. Noetix’s Bumi robots opened with a comedy sketch. Later, Unitree’s bots teamed up with children for backflips and trampoline jumps, followed by Magiclab’s robots in a musical act. The event aired on state channel CGTN and quickly went viral with nearly half a million views on YouTube. Ramesh Srinivasan, an AI policy expert from UCLA, told Al Jazeera that China is sending a strong message to the world, especially the US, about its tech power. He said these robots show China’s fast growth in robotics, which could help in industry and farming as its population falls. Srinivasan also raised questions about the future: "What happens when AI is in these robotic forms? What is this going to mean for working-class people economically? What about more humanoid robots on the battlefield?" He added that robots and AI might become therapists, companions, or even mates. "Do we really want this?" he asked. "We must decide the right roles for robots to create a better future for humans." He called for investing in human needs as technology advances, warning that AI could divide people more if not handled carefully.