During the Biden administration, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and her fellow progressives teamed up with then-Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan to kill Amazon's merger with iRobot, the maker of Roomba, citing antitrust and data privacy concerns. Now, iRobot's technology and consumer data are headed to China, posing what an iRobot cofounder says will be a threat to U.S. national security.
iRobot, founded by MIT scientists in 1990, will sell all of its assets, including data and technology, to China's Picea Robotics as part of a bankruptcy plan announced this week. The $190 million deal comes after iRobot laid off 350 employees from its Bedford, Mass., facilities last year.
It's a sad end for a once-up-and-coming American brand, one that could raise national security concerns given Beijing's penchant for forcing tech companies to cooperate with its surveillance apparatus. iRobot vacuums, like others on the market, collect data from inside consumers' homes.
"I do wish that the data and everything stayed in this country," said iRobot cofounder Helen Greiner. Greiner, who is no longer affiliated with the company, lamented that there has been "hardly any outcry" that iRobot's data and information "will belong to a Chinese company."
"Which is a little bit bizarre to me," she told Bloomberg.
Greiner mentioned the "huge press outcry" over Amazon's July 2022 offer to buy iRobot for $1.7 billion.
That charge was led largely by Khan, Warren, and prominent anti-Big Tech advocacy groups. Khan, who now serves as a co-chair of Zohran Mamdani's mayoral transition team, launched a review of the Amazon-iRobot deal in September 2022, weeks after Amazon announced the proposed acquisition.
Warren and her allies said the deal would give Amazon a market advantage and would "increase its growing surveillance powers."
"Amazon's acquisition of iRobot would give the company access to the inside of homes … effectively giving Amazon 'eyes and ears' inside the home," Warren and fellow Democrats, including now-California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter, said in a letter to Khan on Sept. 28, 2022.
Fight for the Future's Evan Greer argued at the time that "Amazon is a surveillance company" and that buying iRobot "that's essentially built on mapping the inside of people's homes seems like a natural extension of the surveillance reach that Amazon already has."
The European Commission joined the fight in August 2023, launching its own investigation into the proposal.
Facing pressure from all corners, Amazon and iRobot scrapped the merger on Jan. 29, 2024, citing "opposition from EU and U.S. antitrust regulators." According to reports, FTC officials met with Amazon earlier that month to inform the company they would be voting to block the merger. The FTC said in an official statement two days later it was "pleased" that Amazon had called off the deal.
Weeks later, iRobot announced layoffs of more than 40 percent of its workforce, largely based in the United States. Warren deflected blame for the layoffs, saying that she was "sorry when employees lose their jobs because companies are struggling" but that "iRobot's problems didn't start last week or last month or even last year."
"iRobot's problems started long ago when they started shipping jobs over to China," she said.
Warren has not weighed in on iRobot's sale to Picea, but she has expressed concern before about the sale of American technology to China. She has lamented that "China is stealing our technology" and railed against NVIDIA's sale of its computer chips to China.
House Republicans last year blasted Khan and the FTC under then-president Joe Biden, launching an investigation into whether the Biden FTC colluded with the European Commission to block the merger of two American companies.
"Instead of protecting American interests in the global market, the FTC appears to have actively coordinated with a foreign authority to block a merger which could have saved American jobs and promoted American innovation and standing in a vital market," Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.), the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told Khan.
Warren and Khan did not respond to requests for comment.
