'Pregnancy robot from China' is fake, but is the technology behind it possible?

Bizarre imagery flooded newsfeeds this week as word spread about a new "pregnancy robot" in development in China. The images featured plump human babies curled inside the bellies of chrome-plated robots complete with visible wiring and ample curves, despite their lack of mammary glands.

Many outlets — including Newsweek, The Economic Times, and ChosunBiz — named a Chinese outlet, Kuai Ke Zhi, as the story's source. Zhang Qifeng, the developer of the bot intended to carry a pregnancy from conception to birth, reportedly told the outlet that a prototype would be ready as early as 2026 at a price point under 100,000 yuan (around $13,900 USD).

"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," Zhang said, according to Newsweek. "Mature" artificial womb technology just "needs to be implanted in the robot's abdomen so that a real person and the robot can interact to achieve pregnancy," he said, according to ChosunBiz. The nature of that human-robot interaction was not detailed.

Depending on the article, Zhang was cited as the CEO or founder of Kaiwa Technology, a Guangzhou-based company, or as a PhD affiliated with Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Finding no online evidence of Kaiwa Technology, Live Science contacted NTU about their purported affiliation with Zhang Qifeng.

"We would like to inform you that no one by the name of 'Zhang Qifeng' graduated from NTU with a PhD," an NTU spokesperson told Live Science via email. "Our checks also showed no such 'gestation robot' research has been conducted at NTU."

As you may have suspected — and as Snopes has also confirmed — the pregnancy robot isn't real. But the viral story raised questions about the potential of artificial-womb technology. Would it be possible to build a pregnancy robot? Or is the concept pure science fiction? Live Science spoke with experts about the idea, discussing whether it would technically be possible and whether anyone should even try.

"Should we do it? My answer would be categorically 'no,'" said Dr. Harvey Kliman, director of the Reproductive and Placental Research Unit at Yale University School of Medicine. "That being said, intellectually, I think it's interesting to think about the challenges because it helps us actually reflect about what is the beauty and miracle of a normal pregnancy."

Related: If 'pregnancy robots' were real, would you use one?

Artificial wombs?

The pregnancy robot is fake, but scientists have been developing artificial wombs. At Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), scientists are developing a womb-like device called the "extra-uterine environment for newborn development," or EXTEND. The eventual hope is to support babies who are born extremely premature, between 23 and 28 weeks of gestation.

Recent advances have decreased the death rate associated with preterm birth, but health issues, including chronic lung disease and neurodevelopmental problems, remain a big concern for babies born that early. To decrease these risks, CHOP researchers aim to create a uterus-like environment that babies can be placed in after delivery to help them over the 28-week mark.

The device includes a bag full of amniotic fluid, which is made in the lab and contains key nutrients and growth factors. The umbilical cord is attached to an "external oxygenator" that partly stands in for the placenta, facilitating an exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Within the device, a baby would be insulated from changes in temperature, pressure and light, as well as from exposure to germs.

EXTEND has so far been tested with lambs. In a 2017 paper, the team showed that fetal lambs could be supported in the device for a month and that their development continued much as it would have in the womb. In a 2024 paper, they collaborated with Duke University researchers to see how EXTEND impacted gene activity in the brain. The device helped preserve gene activity in premature lambs' brains so that it resembled that of lambs that remained in the womb for much longer.

Meanwhile, some researchers are working on artificial placentas that would fulfill the same purpose as EXTEND, supporting premature babies. These devices have also been tested in lambs but are farther out from human trials than EXTEND is.

The EXTEND team aims to move into human trials soon, though there are questions about when and how it would be ethical to test the device, given many premature babies have a fighting chance with existing technologies.

"In a human setting, a couple weeks is not enough," said Dr. Lusine Aghajanova, a fertility specialist and clinical associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford Medicine, in reference to the length of the tests done so far in lambs. "What that study showed is that it's a concept that can be possible, but it's more complicated than we think," she told Live Science.

Throughout their efforts, the EXTEND developers have stressed that the device is intended as a bridge for premature babies moving from the womb into the world; it is not intended to be used to push fetal viability earlier than 23 weeks. Of course, there's a big difference between keeping an ailing baby alive and gestating a baby from conception, as the fake Kaiwa pregnancy robot was supposed to do.

Related: Should we rethink our legal definition of a human embryo?

Like a 'tomato plant suspended in water'

Presumably, a gestation robot might need to deal with a particularly tricky part of pregnancy: implantation.

In an unassisted pregnancy, an egg travels through a fallopian tube, where it is typically fertilized before moving into the uterus and implanting in the uterine wall. In fertility treatments, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), a fertilized egg is placed into the uterus, where ideally, it then implants itself. That aspect of the treatment is not directly orchestrated by doctors.

In a robotic incubator, though, implantation may not be a critical step, Kliman said. "I'm thinking about hydroponics," he said. "Think of it as a tomato plant suspended in this bucket of water, right?"

Similar to the EXTEND studies with lambs, in theory, a human embryo could be suspended in fluid rather than embedded in something akin to the uterine wall, he said. The real challenge would be ensuring that the embryo remains suspended, so it can grow unimpeded, and that it's supplied with adequate nutrients and factors to grow. The placenta "doesn't actually have to attach to anything or burrow into anything" in that kind of setup, Kliman said.

Aghajanova, on the other hand, thinks recreating implantation would be key. "Implantation is absolutely important," she said. "It's the seed and the soil," referencing the embryo and the uterine lining. Abnormalities in the uterine lining can undermine both fetal growth and placental development, she argued, so some stand-in for the tissue would likely be necessary in a pregnancy robot.

Even if the implantation issue was addressed, delivering the right nutrients to the fetus at the right time could still be tricky.

Early in pregnancy — roughly up to the eighth week or so — glands in the uterine lining produce a nutritious "milk" for the developing embryo and placenta. At that point, blood flow from mother to womb is not fully established, in part, because the maternal blood is too oxygenated, Kliman said. "That high-oxygen state causes too many free radicals and would destroy the DNA of the dividing embryo," he said, so instead, the early womb maintains a low-oxygen state.

In a robot pregnancy, you'd need to carefully recreate that transition from low- to high-oxygen, as well as maintain the womb-like environment and keep it flush with nutrients for months on end. Maternal metabolism shifts dramatically in pregnancy, Aghajanova said, so it would be difficult to know what dose of oxygen is needed at any given stage of development.

"That's mind boggling to me. I'm just trying to think of any system that would work flawlessly for nine months and not get infected," meaning exposed to germs that could derail the whole process, Kliman said. "We're talking extreme challenges of just the machinery, the reliability, the nutrients, the getting rid of the waste — and again, I think the biggest problem, to be honest with you, would be infection."

While those aspects of an artificial womb would be complex, it might be simpler than human reproduction in other respects, Kliman mused. In human pregnancy, the embryo and placenta must be protected from the maternal immune system, lest they be targeted as foreign invaders. Additionally the uterus undergoes changes to create a suitable environment for the embryo, and the placenta releases hormones that prep the mammary glands to make milk. These factors would be irrelevant in a machine, he said.

There are questions about how the fetal immune system might develop differently in a robot. In a human pregnancy, antibodies pass from maternal blood to the fetus via the umbilical cord. That's why a variety of vaccines are given in late pregnancy: The vaccines stimulate maternal antibody production, those antibodies pass to the fetus, and newborns enter the world with some protection against dangerous infections. And additional, non-vaccine-induced antibodies also cross over.

Given robots lack immune systems, developers of a pregnancy robot might need to figure out how to replicate this process, perhaps with lab-made antibodies or with donated blood.

"I don't think that would be that hard," Kliman said. Some of those antibodies could be supplied after birth via breastmilk or through formula containing lab-made antibodies, he suggested. And you might take extra precautions to keep the baby from being exposed to too many germs too soon, if you knew that might be an issue, he added.

In the womb, the maternal immune system must avoid attacking the growing fetus while also protecting it from pathogens, Aghajanova said. The former issue might not be relevant in a robotic pregnancy, but that latter protection would still be necessary, she said.

Related: 'We know what to do; we just have to implement it.': Pregnancy is deadlier in the US than in other wealthy countries. But we could fix that.

Unanswered questions

An additional factor to consider might be the vaginal microbiome, which contains bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms that studies suggest impact the health of the developing fetus. Figuring out how and what to deliver into the robot to mimic this complex microbial community could be tricky, as we don't fully understand which species are helpful to fetal development.

With the loss of a microbiome would likely come the addition of plastic components within the robot itself, Aghajanova added. It's unclear how all that plastic could sway early development, but it likely wouldn't be great, she suggested.

Other quandaries cloud the notion of a pregnancy robot: How would the eggs and sperm be sourced? Whose gametes would be used to test and optimize the device, proving it could lead to a live birth? Where could such research be conducted, legally? Would fertilization occur inside the bot itself, or via a lab procedure akin to IVF? Who is tasked with maintaining and monitoring the bot's functions throughout the "pregnancy"? What would the birthing process look like for a robot, and would engineers be needed in the delivery room? Are there yet-unknown aspects of human pregnancy that a baby grown in a machine would miss out on?

In our current reality, many of these questions remain unanswerable — but they would certainly make a compelling premise for a sci-fi novel.

"It's good science fiction, but in a word, it doesn't exist yet," Aghajanova said. And "we are not that desperate [for such technology], especially in the U.S." In the United States, patients have access to fertility treatments, donor eggs and surrogates, she said.

For Kliman's part, he said that his main takeaway from this thought experiment is simply "what a miracle a pregnancy is."

"We're just little feeble beings trying to conceive of some way to do this artificially, and look at what nature has done," he said. "And it happens four million times a year in our country; we get a normal delivery. So that's the miracle."