A Company That Owns A Sex Robot Maker Has Started Pitching Schools On AI Teachers

Every time you think you’ve found the dumbest possible use for AI, there’s another publicly listed company already asking you to hold its entire keg of beer. This time, as reported by Mashable, it’s Realbotix, a firm that “designs AI-powered humanoid robots built for meaningful human interaction.” This would also be the Realbotix that was previously known as Tokens.com, a crypto company that has since pivoted to AI, and is now trying to put that tech in life-sized robots since purchasing Simulacra in 2024, the parent company of, among others, Abyss Creations, which manufactures the sex doll brand RealDolls.

Tokens renamed itself Realbotix, and now focused on “ultra-realistic humanoid robots and companionship-based AI,” and the latest attention-seeking move is a claim to provide STEM-teaching AI-driven human-sized moving mannequins to an impoverished rural school. I am not making any of this up.

The pitch, as laid out in Realbotix’s press release, is to supply a rural New York school district with one of its “AI-powered teacher’s assistant” that will sit in a high school classroom and teach STEM subjects to teenagers. The “M-Series humanoid robot” uses “natural conversation, facial expressions and real-time interaction to create engaging, hands-on learning experiences.”

Why do I feel like I’m typing out the opening premise of C-tier sci-fi movie?

This ludicrous stunt is being subjected upon Salamanca, New York, a city in Cattaraugus County, with a population of 5,929, and Seneca Nation land. And, as is the case with every single AI grift in existence, it’s being done not to actually help the widely impoverished people of Salamanca, but to try to promote the company’s AI. The giveaway line in the press release reads (our emphasis), “The platform provides scalable AI assistance for both students and educators while strengthening credibility for AI, robots, and STEM education.” There’s also the absolute bullshit line, “we anticipate benefits we cannot yet fully foresee.”

“Sally,” a brown-haired robo-lady, isn’t actually able to move around, so she’ll be sitting in a chair in a classroom as she directly interacts with children. According to New York Focus, the AI inside Sally will remember conversations it has had with children on previous days and be able to continue them, which sounds like both a dystopian nightmare and the most extraordinarily expensive use of AI tokens. Students will also have access to an “avatar” version of the software they can access at home to aid them with homework. And why is anyone letting this happen? Salamanca superintendent Mark Beehler told NY Focus, “Many schools are taking the easy solution of simply banning [AI], but I have found that students will find a way around most rules that schools put in place.” I cannot even get started on how flawed this logic is.

Worse, Realbotix is actually charging the district (where the median family household income is less than half the national average at $30,996 and 22.2 percent of the population live below the poverty line) to provide it with this publicity. The district has spent $57,590 on this farce. But fear not, because Realbotix CEO Andrew Kiguel boasts to NY Focus that this is a discounted price, down from the standard $95,000. What an incredibly generous man. We’ve reached out to ask why the company is charging for its publicity stunt, and whether it has any evidence at all that an LLM-powered doll can meaningfully teach STEM to high school students.

Kick in the AI

This comes at a time when AI use in schools is already proving deeply problematic for teachers and students, even before you take the half-assed software and stick it in some creepy doll’s CPU. The idea that students would sit down and take these dead-eyed bots seriously is farcical, let alone that they would happily see human teachers replaced with them. I would worry about any class of kids who didn’t set one of these things on fire before pushing it out an upstairs window.

Realbotix claims that the Salamanca test targeting 500 students this fall is but the “flagship deployment” and only the start of a mass roll-out. It absolutely will not be. These pout-faced dolls will be in zero classrooms for the whole rest of time. Either that, or they’ll turn on the students before eventually killing us all.

Update: 7/18/2026, 13:18 p.m. ET: Realbotix has reached out to us requesting that we make clear that the dolls used for educational purposes are entirely different from RealDolls, stating the following:

• The Salamanca robot recently began being built as a new unit at Realbotix LLC’s new manufacturing facility.
• Only Realbotix LLC employees are involved in its design, manufacturing and deployment.
• No RealDoll employees, blueprints, designs, products or technology are involved.
• Realbotix robots and RealDoll products are different technologies developed by separate teams for entirely different purposes.
• The Salamanca robot is not anatomically correct and has never been designed, manufactured, marketed, sold or used as an adult product.
• No existing product or hardware is being modified or repurposed for Salamanca.

We have revised the text above to remove a few jokes and insinuations that the dolls are related.

Update: 7/21/2026, 9:23 a.m. ET: Subsequent changes have been made to the headline, image, and first three paragraphs of this article to further clarify the corporate structure separating Realbotix LLC from RealDoll.