NY School Pauses AI Robot Teacher Over Sex Doll Maker Ties
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Salamanca City Central School District approved a nearly $60,000 purchase of a stationary AI robot named 'Sally' from Realbotix to enhance robotics and STEAM education, but paused the pilot after state officials, teachers and residents raised concerns about data privacy and the maker's corporate ties to a sex doll company.
- New York State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa wrote to the district objecting that the robot had been characterized as a 'tutoring platform' and pressing for enhanced student data privacy agreements before any classroom rollout.
- NYSUT president Melinda Person led union opposition, declaring 'a robot built by a company associated with sex dolls has no business in our classrooms' and framing the pilot as a step toward replacing human educators.
- Realbotix pushed back, calling 'Sally' a 'newly manufactured, purpose-built educational unit' and stressing that Realbotix LLC and its sister company Intima LLC (which holds an ownership stake in RealDoll) operate independently with separate management and product lines.
- Superintendent Mark Beehler defended the pilot, saying the robot uses locally stored WozEd curriculum from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, won't collect personal data, record audio or video, or pull from public generative AI services.
- The Salamanca case follows a San Diego charter school's $500,000 deployment last year of two AI robots from UK-based Engineered Arts — an earlier and more expensive precedent for humanoid classroom robots.
- Joplin Ficek, a 2024 Salamanca High graduate, told the district her alma mater 'needs more interaction with the children than having some robot raise our kids,' reflecting lingering community skepticism.
Why it matters: The Salamanca standoff gives districts nationwide a concrete list of friction points — data privacy, corporate lineage, union fears of teacher replacement — to address before any AI-robot classroom pilot. For an isolated reservation district betting on Sally to 'level the playing field' against schools one to two hours away, the pause means its robotics students keep waiting while administrators rework agreements with state education officials.
