Has a Chinese physical AI start-up manipulated a global ranking to beat Nvidia?

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 beginning of that month.However, the victory was short-lived. Just days later, the benchmark’s creators overhauled its methodology and removed the model from the official list, along with several other competitors, after finding evidence of “benchmark hacking”.