A school district in rural upstate New York has suspended plans to introduce a humanoid AI robot into classrooms after facing criticism from state education officials, teachers, and community members over privacy concerns and the manufacturer’s connections to “lifelike” sex robots.
Breitbart News previously reported that Salamanca City Central School District’s board of education approved a $57,000 purchase of an AI-powered humanoid robot from Realbotix, intending to use the stationary unit, already nicknamed Sally, to support high school students studying robotics and technology. The robot features long dark hair and will be equipped with functional arms and hands but non-working legs.
Superintendent Mark Beehler explained the educational vision behind the purchase on Tuesday, stating the robot would serve as a resource for students. “Having a difficult time programming an Arduino board? Don’t even know what an Arduino board is? Ask Sally and she can explain it,” Beehler said. “The robot also provides opportunities for students to learn how the robot is maintained, how it is updated with new approved content, and how to troubleshoot issues.”
Now WAMC reports that as word of the initiative spread through the small community located on the Seneca Nation of Indians reservation, significant opposition emerged from multiple stakeholders. Parents and teachers raised concerns about student data privacy and how personal information would be handled. The situation was further complicated by the revelation that Realbotix has corporate ties to a company that manufactures hyper-realistic sex robots.
Melinda Person, president of New York State United Teachers, strongly criticized the district’s decision. “A robot built by a company associated with sex dolls has no business in our classrooms,” Person said. Teachers unions also expressed concerns that the robot represented an initial step toward replacing human educators with AI.
The district has now placed the pilot program on hold while working through enhanced student data privacy agreements with state education officials and conducting additional community outreach.
State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa voiced her concerns in a letter to the district on Friday, even after her staff met with district officials. “Although you confirmed that the robot would not have any role delivering classroom instruction, a recent presentation to the board characterized the robot as a ‘tutoring platform,’” Rosa wrote. She also emphasized the need for clarification regarding data privacy and security protections.
Person reiterated the union’s position on teacher-student relationships. “Our students don’t need robots,” Person said. “They need real relationships with caring adults.”
Superintendent Beehler defended the initiative, emphasizing that the pilot program, which also includes a virtual AI-powered teacher’s assistant and at-home tutoring program, is not intended to replace teaching staff. “There is no possible way a robot can replace a human in a school,” he said Tuesday. “Even if it were possible, it would in no way be in the best interest of students. Teaching is a human-to-human process.”
Beehler explained that he was connected to Realbotix through a former colleague and that the Las Vegas-based company seemed appropriate because its robots are pre-programmed with WozEd, a curriculum developed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak that the district already uses.
The district addressed privacy concerns in social media posts, stating that Sally will not collect students’ personal information, record audio or video interactions, or transmit data back to Realbotix. The robot has been programmed to avoid inappropriate subjects including sex, violence, and gambling, and cannot access the public internet or use unvetted generative AI services. All information will be stored locally, with the life-sized robot consuming approximately the same energy as a laptop.
Realbotix responded to the controversy on Tuesday, stating that student authentication would be managed through the district’s existing systems and any student-related information would remain encrypted under district control. The company rejected characterizations that Sally was a modified sex doll, describing it as a newly manufactured, purpose-built educational unit with no modified hardware.
The corporate structure involves Realbotix LLC, which focuses on healthcare, education, and other non-adult commercial applications. A sister company, Intima LLC, holds an ownership stake in RealDoll, a manufacturer of sex dolls including AI-powered models marketed as the world’s most advanced sex robots. “Realbotix LLC and Intima LLC have different product offerings with no crossover,” the company said in a statement last week. “The two subsidiaries maintain their own management, personnel, payroll, facilities, manufacturing operations, product development, and market strategies.”
Beehler argued that isolated districts like Salamanca, located along the Allegheny River near the Pennsylvania state line, need innovative approaches to expose students to emerging technology. “In most cases, our students need to travel one to two hours to have opportunities to see emergent technology,” he said Tuesday. “One of the intents of the robot is to help level the playing field and motivate students to continue studying robotics, AI, and STEAM related career pathways.”
Despite these justifications, some community members remain skeptical. Joplin Ficek, who graduated from Salamanca High School in 2024 and currently works at a daycare, questioned the entire premise of introducing robots and AI into educational settings. “They just need to hire more people who are willing to put in the effort for the children,” Ficek said. “They need more interaction with the children than having some robot raise our kids.”
AI’s impact on education is an important topic in the instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI, written by Breitbart News Social Media Director Wynton Hall earlier this year.
In Code Red, Hall explains the danger of leftist bias being introduced into the classroom via AI:
Hall points to Khan Academy’s Khanmigo as an example of how bias operates even in well-designed educational AI. In his book Brave New Words, Salman Khan described how Khanmigo handled the Second Amendment using the Socratic method, “challenging the student in a productive way—one that showed much less bias than the average classroom and actually encouraged the student to think!” But Khan then proudly showcased the same AI “dismantling” skepticism about global warming, praising it for having “successfully dismantled any false information while supporting science-backed arguments” and even generating lesson plans that “suggested actions that my students might take to combat global warming.” Hall’s point is clear: who decides what counts as “false information” determines whose worldview the AI enforces.
It doesn’t stop at lesson plans. Hall warns that Khan’s Schoolhouse.world platform began partnering with elite universities like Columbia, MIT, and Johns Hopkins, using “dialogues” portfolios in which high-schoolers “debate topics like immigration or Israel-Palestine, and rate one another on traits like empathy, curiosity or kindness,” as the New York Times reported. Hall writes: “This kind of proxy for a ‘social credit score,’ which can potentially be used to determine university admissions based on social justice virtue signaling, underscores the stakes as AI’s education pioneers work to remake how our children are taught.”
The political alignment of the partnerships should concern every conservative parent. In 2025, OpenAI teamed up with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to work “with 400,000 teachers to shape the future of AI in schools.” The AFT, Hall notes in CODE RED, is “a massive Democratic Party donor, pumping millions of dollars to Democrats and virtually nothing to Republicans.”
Read more at WAMC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.