(2026-11-05, event — interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics): Xinhua and UBTECH unveiled two life-sized humanoid news anchor robots, "Xinyu" and "Xinyan," in Beijing at the 7th World Media Summit forum on "Artificial Intelligence and Chinese-Style Modernization." The robots connect to Xinhua Yudian, the agency's current-affairs AI launched in June 2026, and are built to read the news and answer questions face to face — the first pairing of a physical humanoid body with the agency's vetted-information AI corpus (Xinhua's 2018 AI anchor was video synthesis with no body; Japan's Kodomoroid android read news in 2014). Xinhua claims complete property rights; UBTECH supplied the bodies, bionic artificial skin, an emotional large language model and the embodied-intelligence hardware, and chairman Zhou Jian says the robots' "brain–expression–control" system retrieves vetted news in real time to limit fabrication risk. No error-rate evaluation published, detailed specs unreleased; Xinhua frames the machines as assisting reporters, not replacing them. Watch: regular news duty, a published accuracy evaluation, further UBTECH placements from the partnership. The deployment adds a state-media customer strand beside UBTECH's industrial-scale bet (the Liuzhou factory thread), not a development of it.
