China’s Physical AI Push, Xi’s North Korea Visit, and the Ghost Kitchen Crackdown

This episode of China Decode covers three distinct developments: a Chinese startup topping a global leaderboard for physical AI models, Xi Jinping’s first visit to North Korea since 2019, and a regulatory crackdown on ghost kitchens in China’s food delivery industry. The dominant theme is China’s accelerating push into robotics and embodied intelligence, but the episode also offers a sobering look at the limits of Chinese leverage over North Korea and the unsavory underside of the country’s hyper-competitive food delivery market.

Spirit AI Tops the Global Physical AI Leaderboard

The headline development is that a Chinese startup called Spirit AI has claimed the top spot on a major global leaderboard for embodied intelligence models. Its model, Spirit V1.6, became the first Chinese model to top the Robo Arena leaderboard, beating Nvidia’s Cosmos III into second place. The leaderboard measures how effectively a robot can translate a “robot policy”—essentially an instruction turned into mathematical cues—into real-world actions. This is a benchmark for what the hosts call “physical AI”: machines that perceive, understand, and interact with their environment, rather than simply repeating the same factory task over and over.