Desire in Code: Legal Perspectives on Sex Robots and Consent
Carlotta Rigotti is a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University’s eLaw – Center for Law and Digital Technologies. She works at the intersection of law, technology, and gender, and her latest book, The Regulation of Sex Robots: Gender and Sexuality in the Era of Artificial Intelligence (Routledge, 2025), extends that agenda with a framework for governing human-like, AI-enabled sexual technologies, moving beyond binary debates and pushing for context-aware regulation, rather than knee-jerk bans.
Who is consent for in human–robot sex?
Rigotti starts from a blunt reality: much of today’s sex-robot design is built for a narrow market, which risks reproducing old hierarchies. As the university summary of the paper puts it, sex robots are “designed primarily for a cisgender, heterosexual male market” and can “risk reinforcing women’s subordination and oppression.” That framing isn’t pearl-clutching; it’s a diagnosis of how market default settings bleed into legal defaults.
When machines “say yes”
The article’s most arresting idea is also its simplest: simulated consent is not consent. In Rigotti’s analysis, the capacity of a robot to “simulate consent further complicates [its] legal and societal positioning.” In other words, if a device always complies, law can’t just point to a green light and call it a day; it has to ask what that green light means, to whom, and with what downstream social effects.
Beyond bans: code consent into design
Rather than outlawing the tech outright, Rigotti argues for building affirmative-consent standards into the systems themselves: design as governance. The piece “explores regulatory alternatives that integrate affirmative consent into design,” shifting the conversation from whether these devices should exist to how they must behave if they do.
Can the EU’s AI Act help?
Rigotti looks at tools already on the table. The paper “examines the potential of the AI Act and its provisions on codes of conduct” as levers to shape industry practice before harms calcify. That positions sex-robot governance within Europe’s wider AI rulebook, suggesting consent-by-design could be scaffolded via recognized codes rather than left to ad-hoc ethics statements.
From morality policing to context-aware regulation
This through-line echoes Rigotti’s new book, which “challenges the socio-legal construction of gender and sexuality, critiques regulatory inertia and morality policing, and advocates for a nuanced, context-aware approach.” The point is not to moralize from above but to regulate from context: attentive to power, markets, and lived experience, so that the legal definition of consent doesn’t get quietly rewritten by default settings.
Why this matters now
If human–robot intimacy is going to be a real market, then law has to get there early. Rigotti’s intervention says: don’t confuse programmable obedience with ethical permission; don’t retreat to prohibition that drives development underground; do harden design norms around affirmative consent and audit them with recognizable legal tools. Framed this way, the debate isn’t just about robots, it’s about who gets to define consent in a world of compliant machines.
The author’s thesis, in plain terms
Rigotti’s thesis is that we should regulate sex robots by embedding affirmative-consent standards into their design and governance, leveraging instruments like the EU AI Act’s codes of conduct rather than leaning on bans or moral panic. Because simulated compliance is not consent, the law must set context-aware rules that disrupt gendered power imbalances instead of encoding them.
