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):
(The Learning Loop on Facebook)
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. It was not.
Several news outlets published such reports, 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 that 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 but did not receive a response by press time.
All news reports referred to an inventor supposedly 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.
However, a spokesperson for NTU said that no alleged inventor with that name had ever graduated from the higher learning institution and no such robot had been developed there, either. "No one by the name of 'Zhang Qifeng' graduated from NTU with a PhD," the spokesperson said. "Our checks also showed no such 'gestation robot' research has been conducted at NTU." The claim is therefore false.
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, given the fact that NTU denied such research had ever taken place and that several news outlets removed the stories from their websites, Snopes deems the claim false.