Spirit AI, a Chinese start-up of physical AI, briefly overcame Nvidia in the RoboArena benchmark, but was disqualified after manipulation was discovered in the ranking. The incident exposes the intense technological competition between the United States and China, and raises doubts about the reliability of the robotic evaluation metrics. *** Spirit AI, founded in Hangzhou in 2024, headed for a few days the RoboArena ranking with its Spirit v1.6 …