China’s state news agency unveils life-size humanoid robots to read the news
Xinhua says its two robot anchors, built with robot maker UBTECH, read only from the agency’s reviewed database to avoid AI errors.
Xinhua, China’s government-run news agency, unveiled two life-size humanoid robot news anchors on Thursday at the World Media Summit in Beijing, the agency said. It called them the world’s first.
The robots, a male anchor named Xinyu and a female anchor named Xinyan, were built with UBTECH, a Chinese maker of humanoid robots, Xinhua said. Chinese film director Zhang Yimou led their visual design. Xinhua said the robots are built to human scale and can present the news on camera.
Unlike chatbots such as ChatGPT that write answers on the spot and can invent facts—a problem known as hallucination—Xinhua said its anchors pull reviewed news text in real time from Xinhua Yudian, the agency’s own AI database of current-affairs information, so every line can be traced. UBTECH founder and CEO Zhou Jian said this avoids AI hallucination risks, according to Xinhua. UBTECH supplied artificial skin, hardware, an operating system and an AI model meant to express emotion.
Qian Tong, director of Xinhua’s New Media Center, said the robots are a new newsroom role, not the main players, helping with newscasts, other languages and live interaction. The summit runs through Nov. 9, with nearly 500 delegates from about 330 media outlets and other groups in 112 countries and regions, Xinhua said.
Source: Xinhua, Nov. 5, 2026 (in Chinese); Xinhua, Nov. 5, 2026 (in Chinese)