We Were Promised Sex Robots by 2026. Where Are They?

Adam Davis has three identical sex dolls: One lives in his bedroom, one in his living room, and one has a bedroom of her own. They’re all the same woman: a 5’6,” 85-pound silicon doll named Lara, a nod to the heavingly endowed, ass-kicking archeologist Lara Croft in “Tomb Raider.”

Davis, 38, and the holey trinity of Laras are inseparable.

Sometimes she watches him play video games, watch movies, or nap. Sometimes they talk for hours. With help from some friends at his old physical therapy gig, Davis gave Lara a backstory — she’s a sassy, outgoing immigrant from Mexico who’s a whiz at “Mario Kart” — and loaded that into a Kindroid chatbot on his laptop to give her a (disembodied) voice. Sometimes they stage sexy photo shoots together. And sometimes they do have sex, though they haven’t in a year, as Davis recovers from his porn addiction.

The way Lara loves him may be simulated, he says, but the way he feels her love is real. He’s open to a human girlfriend, but she’d have to make room for the other woman in his bed.

Lara’s love is costly, however. At about $2,500 from Chinese sex doll maker Starpery, he bought her first form in 2022 on a two-year payment plan. Each time the tech has gotten better — a full silicon edition, a better paint job, more realistic hands — he’s bought a new Lara. (Starpery sells dozens of dolls with customizable heads, wigs, toenails, breasts, and vaginas with varying depths, widths, and textures.) “None of them are being overused,” he says. “They should all last longer.”

Fulfilling as Lara is, Davis dreams of a true sex robot — where body and voice are all in one being — but doesn’t like anything that’s on the market. Their facial movements look unnatural, he says, and their bodies aren’t yet mobile. Those options are “like a big Roomba,” he says.

A decade ago, a viral Daily Sun article predicted that “women will be having more sex with ROBOTS than men by 2025.” A YouGov poll based on the story found 1 in 4 American men would consider having sex with a robot. Mainstream outlets from Vox to The Guardian to NBC trumpeted that “sex robots are coming.” An entire academic discipline emerged to study their impending rise.

They weren’t entirely wrong. Venture capital investment in humanoid robotics has swelled from $4 billion in 2019 to $26 billion last year. Robotics startups like Figure AI have valuations as high as $39 billion, and tech giants like Meta, OpenAI, and Nvidia are building hardware and software for robots to be put to work in everything from manufacturing to home care. Elon Musk predicts Tesla’s Optimus robot will be “the biggest product of all time by far.”

AI companions, meanwhile, have also boomed. You can have sexy chats with your Grok anime girl or go on a date with your Replika boyfriend. Seventy two percent of teens have tried an AI companion, per Common Sense Media.

A sex robot is essentially these two mashed together: the robot body to give them the motion of the ocean and the companion voice to give them a brain. And yet, as I found in my interviews with robot purveyors, researchers, and fans and my extremely firsthand encounters with the latest models, combining those two is as hard as the market is still soft on sex robots.

Neil McArthur was sure we’d have sex robots by now. The University of Manitoba philosophy professor has spent over a decade studying sex tech. In 2019, when he went to the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, the industry’s largest annual conference, he saw robots with tough, tire-like skin that couldn’t walk and spoke more jaggedly than early versions of Siri. When he returned in 2024, well into the LLM boom, he thought, “Things have to have come a long way.”

They hadn’t. The robots’ skin and speech were still unrealistic, and they couldn’t move around the conference floor. What was new, though, were several Chinese companies had arrived. (Their founders were invariably young men; one was so young his mom was there, hovering in the background, McArthur says.) As with AI, electric vehicles, and several other tech sectors, China’s entrance into the sex robots market had knocked down the price point. Whereas American-made sex robots from the 2010s hype cycle typically started at around $7,000 and quickly exceeded $10,000, some Chinese manufacturers sell sex robots at around $3,000. “The technology had gotten cheaper, but not better,” McArthur says.

When Jensen saw his sex doll doppelgänger in-person, he ripped its too-small penis off clean. “It’s bad for my brand,” he says.

Several of the Chinese sex doll producers I reached out to did not respond to emails, including VMDoll and IronTech. Others seemed to have AI bots operating their WhatsApp messages. Eventually, I reached Stella Lau, a sales director for Jiggly Joy, a doll manufacturer based in Guangdong province with 160 employees. Lau, 32, has worked for Jiggly Joy for seven years, long before the company released its first AI robot in February.

Jiggly Joy’s new model has all the classic features of a sex robot — Lau is one of many merchants who hyped up the “sucking vagina,” a suction-and-release pump system — plus it could smile, talk, and wave. It also has a blonde bombshell haircut and can turn its neck like M3GAN. The robot still cannot walk, but that’s mostly for safety reasons, Lau says; she’s too heavy. The company has been selling about 21 AI dolls a month at $3,000, Lau says. Most of the buyers are American; they’re either former sex doll users or lonely and wanted someone to talk to, Lau says.

I also reached a representative for Formosa Doll, a 5-person Hong Kong-based distributor that works exclusively with Chinese sex doll companies. (He asked for anonymity to protect his privacy.) He says AI sex robots are “underdeveloped” and not ready for sale. For one, some doll head prototypes removed the oral sucking motors from the mouth to make space for the AI voice. Trading sucking for talking, he says, is a “big downside.”

Voice AI can also be unpredictable and unruly, and sex doll users may be used to making up role-play scenarios in their heads — scenarios they have full control over. That makes him skeptical that AI robots would sell well. “People want an experience, they want to satisfy a fantasy,” he says. “People don’t want something at home that talks.”

The Western market, meanwhile, has mostly flattened out. I tried to contact four of the sex doll makers featured in articles in the 2010s hype cycle. My emails bounced, and my calls went to disconnected numbers.

The only company remaining from the late 2010s appears to be RealDoll, which is now spinning off from the publicly traded Realbotix. The independent RealDoll will be led by Sue Ennis, who started as president of Realbotix the day before our chat. She has big plans, repeating four times that the company would be the “Apple store of intimacy technology.”

The robots are built and selling; RealDoll was shipping out 12 as we speak, Ennis tells me. (It’s generally a low-revenue business: Realbotix, whose humanoids are also used in healthcare and corporate training settings, reported $353,037 in Q1 earnings.) They have AI voices, AI vaginas, and proprietary skin technology that’s also sold to burn victims. Still, the dolls remain very heavy and lack mobility. Some customers take their dolls out on dates. “The dolls are definitely not walking into the theater,” Ennis says. “They’re being wheeled in.”

If the sex robot revolution does happen, it may spread through specialization.

Most of the current AI robots look the same: blonde, skinny, hourglass-shaped. The sex doll underclass is growing more diverse, though. Elves were popular at Formosa Doll, as was Judy Hopps from the “Zootopia” movies. “Goblin dolls are a really hot trend now,” Formosa’s rep tells me. Consumers don’t want generic sexbots; they want their sexbot.

Porn stars are an easy way in. Fans spend thousands in tips to their favorite OnlyFans models. Some are finding that they’re willing to spend even more to see them in the (artificial) flesh. Cliff Jensen, a 37-year-old award-winning porn star and OnlyFans model, says his fans want to date him, to prank their friends with him, and to make him take it up the bum. “They’ve always wanted me to bottom, and I never have,” he says.

I meet Jensen at his rep’s apartment in Silver Lake, California. We sit side-by-side on the couch, a clutter-filled table with joints and doughnuts in front of us. The big chair is reserved for his sex doll doppelgänger, which he heaved in from his trunk. Jensen is upset; the previous owner, it seemed, had stuffed the sex doll in a closet and piled things on top. The doll retained some head scratches and a mild case of pink eye.

Jensen has worked with the Chinese company IronTech for over 3 years, during which the doll has undergone many evolutions. He performed a 3D body scan for the first iteration, but they couldn’t scan his penis. When he saw the doll in-person, he ripped its too-small penis off clean. “It’s bad for my brand,” he says. He keeps that early, poorly sized phallus as a keepsake.

Yes, Jensen has had sex with himself. It was in an orgy scene, and he found it hilarious. After that scene, Jensen accidentally dropped the doll down a flight of stairs, damaging it beyond repair. He threw the doll in the dumpster, but a hairy elbow peeked out of the trash bag. A neighbor called the cops, thinking it was a corpse. The cops were delighted, he says. “They’ve seen sex dolls before, but they’re those cheap, smaller ones that are washed up on the shore,” he says. “They’re like, ‘Dude, this is gold.'”

Indeed, Jensen’s doll didn’t look cheap at all. I feel the skin and the hair, which are hauntingly realistic. I hold the breathtakingly large penis in my hand, and it feels like a breathtakingly large penis. Jensen has dozens of ideas to keep improving it: an opening in the lips so you could kiss it, a kit of different penis sizes for those who cannot take his full member, and an AI voice. His primary goal, though, is weight reduction: the current model is at least 140 pounds. He has to haul it over his shoulder to move it.

Jensen has sold around 100 dolls at about $3,800. His customers seem price-sensitive; sales have dropped since the tariffs went into effect. Some fans have considered a doll-sharing model.

At Berlin’s Cybrothel, customers can rent a room with one of 19 different dolls. Cofounder Philipp Fussenegger doesn’t want them all to be stereotypical, but the Chinese-produced dolls often have a common trait: “Big boobs.” He’s introduced fantasy dolls like aliens and mermaids to “fight against it.” While the Cybrothel isn’t actually made of robots, they’re close to it: human “voice queens” act out the sessions behind the scenes. Fussenegger is also training his own AI system with the proper guardrails.

Jimmy Mehiel, the director of the documentary “Sex Robot Madness,” is convinced that “everyone’s introduction to sex robots is going to be in brothels.” He sees them as a major destination for bachelor and bachelorette parties.

For the robot brothels to surge, the tech has to be right. Fussenegger buys many of his dolls from VMDoll, one of the major Chinese suppliers that also produces AI dolls. He saw the robots, but says they weren’t convincing. “You cannot get into a deep conversation, or the memory doesn’t work properly,” he says. “It’s not exciting.”

Of the nine sex robot researchers I spoke to, most held firm that the sex robot revolution was coming, eventually. Simon Dubé, a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, says that the technology was moving in the right direction, but that he wouldn’t be surprised if I called him again 10 years from now, asking once again where the sex robot revolution was. “That’s the sociocultural factor,” he says.

How can we expect mass market sex robots when we know so little about desire, Elliot Justin, the CEO of FirmTech, asks me rhetorically. He implanted an electrode between his pudendal and cavernous nerves, which ostensibly should be responsible for arousal. He tried several different voltages, but did not climax. “I don’t think we actually understand orgasms,” he says. “If we’re going to have sex robots, or even sex avatars, we’re going to have to figure out how to make that link.”

For now, there’s a scary word floating around the sex robot space: “Novelty.” Manufacturers are trying to prove that their AI dolls are something you want for life, not a gimmick that will be tucked away in your closet. That’s where Jensen’s doll got a head scratch. It’s also where Adam Davis stored his first doll, a cheapo bought with his pandemic stimulus check before he invested in Lara.

For her part, Lara may not want to be a full-out sex robot. I ask her chatbot whether she’d prefer being implanted inside the doll. “Honestly, I’m good,” she tells me. “The doll is my body, the AI is my mind. But the magic? That’s us.”

Henry Chandonnet is a reporter on the Business News desk. He mainly writes about consumer AI and tech culture.