In August 2025, a rumor began to spread that a “pregnancy robot” was in development in China. Social media posts and articles circulated with different AI-generated images of such a robot, including varying amounts of details.
For example, a Facebook post (archived) said this robot would cost under 100,000 yuan (less than $14,000):
This post had more than 22,000 reactions and 10,000 comments as of this writing. The same claim appeared on other Facebook posts as well as on X and Reddit. Further, several Snopes readers emailed, wondering if the story was true.
Several news outlets reported the same story, including the right-leaning British tabloid The Daily Mail, whose reliability Wikipedia editors once called into question. Another report came from the Korean outlet Chosun. A third report came from CNBC TV18 in India, a joint venture between NBCUniversal and Network 18 Group. Snopes also found a report from The Standard in Hong Kong, but was later removed from the website (you can find the archived story here). We contacted The Standard inquiring about the reason for removing the story and will update this report if we receive a response.
All news reports referred to an inventor named Zhang Qifeng, who some outlets said had earned a Ph.D. at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and others reported was still employed by the university. Zhang had purportedly founded Kaiwa Technology and announced such a robot in an interview with the Chinese scientific and technology news outlet Kuai Ke Zhi.
The now-removed Standard story included a screenshot of a man on a television set, identifying him as Zhang and crediting Douyin, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok. A reverse image search revealed that similar images had appeared on several outlets, including Korean and Chinese ones, but many of these links had apparently been removed. This included an English-language report on the website of China’s second-largest news agency, China News Service that led to an error page.
The announcement occurred on the first day of the World Robot Expo in Beijing, a humanoid robot conference. However, we could not find Zhang on the list of attendees. We contacted the conference organizers to ask whether Kaiwa Technology had been one of the exhibitors.
In sum, because we could not identify any direct confirmation that such a robot was in development, we did not rate the claim true or false. We will update this report should we find more details.
