China’s XPeng has recently unveiled its latest humanoid robot, IRON – a female-form machine that stunned viewers with such fluid, natural motion that many questioned whether it was actually a person in disguise. What began as scattered online speculation quickly exploded into trending debates, prompting XPeng to step in.

To silence the doubts, engineers cut open the robot’s leg live on stage, revealing the mechanical limb beneath its clothing and synthetic muscle fibres. “Some people just can’t believe how fast the world is changing,” CEO He Xiaopeng wrote on Weibo.

The new IRON model features a humanoid spine, bionic muscles, flexible skin and a 3D curved display on its head. It runs on XPeng’s second-generation VLA model supported by three in-house Turing chips delivering 2,250 trillion operations per second of computing power, enabling advanced conversation, walking and interactive capabilities.

XPeng says it aims to move beyond prototypes and achieve mass production of high-end humanoid robots by the end of 2026.