As humanoid and embodied intelligence robots increasingly enter public and private spaces, Chinese insurers are rolling out specialized products to address potential accidents and liability risks that could impede widespread adoption.
Since September, leading property insurers including Ping An Property & Casualty, CPIC Property & Casualty, and PICC Property & Casualty have introduced robot-focused coverage.
Ping An P&C now provides scenario-based protection covering operations, production, and research and development activities. PICC offers a comprehensive package that combines coverage for robot body damage and third-party liability, including risks from natural disasters, accidental damage, cybersecurity incidents, delivery robot mishaps, and medical accidents involving surgical robots.
Industry insiders note that the embodied intelligence sector lacks unified international or industry standards, creating compatibility and safety concerns. Developers may also face legal challenges related to data compliance and cross-border data flows. Robots without robust safety protocols risk injuring people due to software errors or improper operation.
"One of our robots broke its leg while dancing, and another bumped into a person while walking," said a manager at a robotics company, illustrating the everyday risks associated with these machines.
Insurers Push Full-Chain Protection as Robotics Scale Up
China Pacific Property Insurance Ningbo branch launched a “Smart Protection” policy that covers the entire chain—from manufacturing and sales to leasing and usage. The model centers on “humanized risk assessment,” which simulates human behavior patterns to evaluate mechanical risk exposure.
The policy bundles coverage for robot body damage, third-party liability, and property loss, and offers scenario-specific clauses for accidents such as welding-arm malfunctions and rescue-robot falls. Importantly, it provides daily, weekly, and monthly pricing options—an attempt to adapt to surging robot leasing and the short-term needs of small and medium-sized businesses.
“This type of flexible protection directly targets core industry bottlenecks,” said Wang Peng, associate researcher at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences. But he noted that pricing still lags behind the reality of robot usage: “Current models don’t sufficiently factor in usage frequency, making premiums artificially low. A usage-based insurance model is necessary for real-time adjustments.”
PICC P/C, meanwhile, introduced a dual-product package combining body loss insurance with third-party liability insurance. In addition to traditional risks like collisions and typhoons, PICC’s policies now cover system crashes stemming from cyberattacks and algorithmic faults—a first for China’s robot insurance segment.
In November, PICC’s Suzhou branch issued Jiangsu Province’s first third-party liability policy for embodied intelligence, with coverage up to 1 million yuan, focusing on delivery-robot accidents that may lead to medical compensation claims.
Yet despite these experiments, insurers acknowledge they still lack consistent loss-assessment protocols—especially in environments where risks occur frequently, such as industrial welding, logistics robotics, and search-and-rescue operations.
The difficulty of attributing robot failures poses one of the industry’s biggest challenges. A robotic arm’s sensor failure could be caused by operator error or by an algorithm defect. Disentangling the two is often impossible without deep access to the robot’s internal data.
Currently, insurers are working closely with manufacturers, forming joint assessment teams to accelerate claims processing. A recent insurance package launched in Hangzhou—the “Trinity” plan—adds layers of technical analysis and legal consultation to help resolve disputes. But these efforts remain piecemeal, and a national standard has yet to emerge.
Damage assessment is further complicated by the hybrid nature of embodied intelligence, where mechanical components and software are intertwined. Failures often involve multi-step causal chains triggered by both hardware degradation and algorithmic misjudgment.
One robotics industry veteran said the field urgently needs shared risk databases. “Insurers must build real-time data-sharing systems with manufacturers,” he said. “Claims can’t remain purely retrospective. Prevention must become part of the framework.”
Wang Peng echoed this point, recommending a two-part process—“data extraction plus third-party appraisal”—to standardize evaluations and reduce disputes over algorithm-related faults.
Human-Robot Interaction Creates New Gaps: Ethics, Privacy, and Accountability
Insurance products today still struggle to address the complexities of human-robot interaction. The risks extend far beyond mechanical failures, touching on ethics, emotions, privacy, and medical decisions.
Consider eldercare robots: if a navigation error causes an older adult to fall, who is responsible? The maker? The operator? The insurer? Policies today treat such incidents inconsistently, and their terms lack clarity.
“Most liability insurance is limited to physical injuries,” Wang said. “It doesn’t cover ethical risks—algorithmic discrimination, emotional harm, privacy leaks. These are increasingly common.”
Insurers are trying to reduce these blind spots. Ping An’s “Comprehensive Financial Solution” includes risk protection for data-compliance issues tied to R&D, offering legal services for cross-border data processing—critical for companies developing humanoid robots with cloud-connected systems.
Still, quantifying ethical harm remains nearly impossible. Insurers say they need collaboration from academics, robotics experts, and regulators to build robust assessment models.
As robots become more autonomous—and more connected—the question of accountability grows urgent. If a robot loses control due to a cyberattack, should it be classified as an equipment failure or a liability incident? Policies from major insurers vary widely.
CPIC includes “abnormal operation” as an insurable risk; PICC explicitly excludes losses caused by “intentional malicious manipulation.” These inconsistencies, combined with fragmented regulation, have created what some executives call a “responsibility vacuum.”
Wang argued for a top-down regulatory architecture: “We need unified standards to define triggers and compensation thresholds for cybersecurity breaches and algorithm anomalies. And we need dual responsibility lines to determine who pays.”
He suggested borrowing from the EU’s tiered regulatory model and setting differentiated capital requirements for insurers operating in high-risk robot categories.
Industry insiders emphasize that embodied intelligence has already become part of national strategy, calling for the National Financial Regulatory Administration to work with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to build integrated rules.
They say the country urgently needs three types of standards:
Risk-definition standards for algorithm anomalies, data breaches, and cyberattacks.
Technical assessment protocols for system failures—from sensor burnout to software miscalibration.
Solvency requirements to prevent insurance firms from being overwhelmed by claims in a fast-moving, high-uncertainty sector.
Local governments are beginning to experiment. In Hangzhou’s Binjiang district, the Embodied Intelligence Industry Alliance has created standardized contracts between insurers and robotics firms. These agreements clearly define responsibilities—manufacturers handle technical defects, while users assume liability for improper operations—offering one possible blueprint for a maturing market.
As embodied intelligence becomes a core element of China’s future industrial system, insurers face both a risk and an opportunity: the chance to build a new financial safety net for machines that are increasingly acting alongside humans.
