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A Chinese tech firm, Kaiwa Technology, says it is close to unveiling a humanoid robot designed with an artificial womb that can give birth to human babies. A prototype of the “pregnancy robot” or “gestation robot” is expected to debut by 2026 and cost less than $14,000. The announcement was met with much skepticism and concern, but also a significant amount of support.
Can a robot really have a human baby?
Kaiwa Technology claims the robot will be able to carry a fetus for 10 months and give birth to a human child. The child will gestate inside an artificial womb filled with artificial amniotic fluid and receive nutrients through a hose, according to Chosun Biz.
“Some people don’t want to get married but still want a ‘wife;’ some don’t want to be pregnant but still want a child. So one function of our ‘robot wife’ is that it can carry a pregnancy,” said Zhang Qifeng, founder Kaiwa Technology.
Interesting Engineering reports that the life-sized humanoid surrogate pregnancy robot was unveiled at the 2025 World Robot Conference in Beijing earlier this month.
There, Zhang said the technology is already in a “mature stage,” and that now it just “needs to be implanted in the robot’s abdomen so that a real person and the robot can interact to achieve pregnancy, allowing the fetus to grow inside.” Zhang has, however, yet to specifically explain how the humanoid “pregnancy robot” will support fertilization and implantation in the artificial womb.
“We want to integrate a gestation chamber into a humanoid robot and build an artificial womb so it can carry a full-term pregnancy ‘in the normal way,'” Zhang told tech media outlet Kuai Ke Zhi.
Not everyone is on board
“Pregnancy is an extremely complex process, with each step being extremely delicate and critical,” said Yi Fuxian, an obstetrician at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told Newsweek, adding that the robot is “likely just a gimmick.” He also warned that there could be “many health and ethical risks” and that many of those risks “emerge at different ages, not to mention mental health issues.”
Nearly 4,000 comments were made on Weibo about the “pregnancy robot,” according to Chosun Biz, with many people expressing concerns and objections.
“It is cruel for a fetus to be born without connection to a mother,” read one comment, and “It completely violates human ethics,” read another.
The majority of the comments, however, were positive. “It’s good that women don’t have to suffer,” one person wrote, while another commented, “Women have finally been liberated.”
Interestingly, surrogacy is currently illegal in China, yet this life-size humanoid “pregnancy robot” from Kaiwa Technology could somehow skirt those laws.
Newsweek reports that they reached out to the Chinese foreign ministry by email with a request for comment, but did not hear back before publication.