WMDOLL, based in China’s southeastern Guangdong province, develop AI-powered sex dolls that can move and talk without human control.

Costing between £1,300 and £5,796 (10,000 to 50,000 yuan) the AI dolls, launched in 2016, can be customised for height, skin tone, breast size, eye colour and hairstyle.

WMDOLL is aiming to dominate the market in the United States, a lucrative market where 50% of its exports are sold.

To do so, Liu Ding, WMDOLL product manager, believes more robotic advancements need to be made in order to attract more customers.

“Of course we’re not expecting to make our AI dolls that human-like, after all we’re just making adult products,” Ding told Reuters.

“But we will surely add more advanced technologies… for example making the limbs move more naturally.”

DS Doll, a robotics firm based in Dalian, China, is also aiming to develop a full body movement android it can produce and sell en masse.

In May, the company released a video showing the first prototype of its full body movement sex robot, whose face, head, neck, shoulders and torso have autonomous motion.

Personally, I’m more concerned about security:

National security experts worry that, despite the companies [like Huawei and ZTE] being private entities, data stored on devices produced by Chinese providers could potentially end up in the hands of the Chinese government.

“Based on what we do know about China’s systematic use of electronic communications technologies to steal intellectual property, among other things, and based on how modern intelligence services tend to operate, there is good reason to surmise that there is no perfectly clean divide between the state and companies like those mentioned above in places like China,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

Will your Chinese-made sexbot, particularly any future AI versions, come pre-hacked by the Chinese intelligence agencies? I will leave the last word to Texan Congressman Mike Conaway:

“Out of an abundance of caution, we don’t want to make ourselves vulnerable to backdoor entrances.”

Arthur Chrenkoff blogs at The Daily Chrenk, where this piece also appears.