For decades, the United States has led the world in generating foundational scientific knowledge, trusting that innovation would naturally translate into national advantage. But the story of Unitree Robotics and its globally dominant Go2 robot dog — whose core locomotion breakthroughs trace directly to U.S. military-funded research — asks a harder question: who ultimately benefits when knowledge flows freely but the capacity to manufacture at scale does not? In the gap between American discovery and Chinese commercialization, a structural vulnerability has quietly taken shape.