Sophia was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship in 2017.
Developed by Hong Kong company Hanson Robotics, Sophia is a humanoid social robot designed to converse with people and display simulated facial expressions. Saudi Arabia announced the citizenship at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh in October 2017.
The announcement made Sophia the first robot publicly described as holding citizenship, although it also prompted questions about what legal rights or responsibilities that status involved. The event was primarily a symbolic publicity milestone rather than evidence that Sophia possessed human legal capacities.
Sophia is often confused with Pepper, a SoftBank Robotics robot designed for customer interaction, and Nadine, a social robot developed at Nanyang Technological University. Their developers and appearances differ.