Mexican president unveils AI-powered robocop and robodog as part of security plan

MEXICO CITY (CN) — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and the Mexico state Governor Delfina Gómez, unveiled two AI-powered police robots, CeCi and K7, on Wednesday as part of the federal government’s presentation of advances in the National Public Security Strategy implemented by Sheinbaum in October 2024.The security strategy focuses on four main pillars: addressing root causes, consolidating the National Guard, strengthening intelligence and investigations and internal cooperation between security agencies.CeCi presented itself to eager onlookers taking phone video during the president’s morning press conference from the state of Mexico.The silver robot wears a red government vest. It stands upright with a black cable running down its back. Its eyes are a neon blue strip of light, its hands look like hockey gloves. The dog moves jerkily, with its robot-head faced downward while his snout spins around in circles as if sucking up lint from the carpet.Sheinbaum said the robots will aid in security in the state of Mexico, home to some of the country’s most populated municipalities— Ecatepec and Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl.“I am Ce-Cinco from the state of Mexico, artificial intelligence assistant to support operations,” said CeCi, named after the broad and expanding Command, Control, Computation, Communication and Citizen Contact Center surveillance apparatus across the country called C5.“My functions include video surveillance, coordinated monitoring, location analysis, facial recognition, license plate reading, tactical drones, citizen attention, 911 linked with businesses. There’s also a specialization for violence against women,” said the robot during the morning press conference.Esteban Salmón, an anthropologist and postdoctoral research associate at Brown University who studied how surveillance technology in Mexico transforms criminal investigations, said this kind of unveiling is a good way to advertise the technological advancements being used by the Mexican government, but the issues of crime are much deeper.“The idea of presenting these robots as some sort of futuristic, very advanced way of surveillance just speaks about the popularity of this, as if the technology is a type of ‘silver bullet’ in the sense that we’ll just invest more in technology rather than invest more in bettering prosecutors’ investigation capacities,” said Salmón.He noted the Investigation and Intelligence Law and National Public Security System Law, approved on June 9, expanded the capacity of the police, particularly the Federal Preventive Police, to investigate crimes on their own using surveillance footage.“Before the reform, the prosecutors had the monopoly on investigation, and what the reform did was also legally include the capacity of the preventive police and not just the investigative police to investigate crimes directly. The C5 and the video surveillance systems typically depend on the preventive police, and not on the prosecutors. It is a legal reform that makes it easier for police to use this evidence,” he said.In his field research, Salmón found that the surveillance technology — though popular among the majority of citizens he interviewed — doesn’t usually hold up during prosecution.“The surveillance videos are used to gather intelligence and sometimes are used as evidence in criminal cases. The problem with the surveillance cameras is that sometimes the evidence that the police are able to gather is not conclusive enough,” he said.Salmón said sometimes in the video recording the faces of the people that are accused of crimes are not visible, which means it won’t hold up in a criminal case and can lead to police abuse.“So they frame the people that they think may have committed a crime for another crime, which is not the crime that they saw using the surveillance cameras,” said Salmón.The cameras also have implicit biases in that they attempt to detect violent crimes that happen in public spaces only but don’t have the capacity to investigate more complex criminal activity. These crimes include, according to Salmón, the material base of organized crime and drug trafficking, white-collar crimes and domestic violence.“Those crimes are typically not committed in a way that surveillance cameras will be useful in solving,” he said. “Crime that happens in private spaces is much more difficult to investigate and needs other kinds of capacities that are abandoned because the enormous investment that goes into expanding the surveillance system,” said Salmón.On Wednesday, Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection of Mexico Omar García Harfuch announced 3,300 people were arrested in the state of Mexico for high-impact crimes between Oct. 1, 2024, and June 30, 2026. Additionally, more than 1,300 kilograms of drugs, 819 firearms and over 28,000 rounds of ammunition were seized.As part of the federal and state government crackdown on crime in the entity, State of Mexico Security Secretary Cristóbal Castañeda announced in June that the video surveillance network connected to the State of Mexico monitoring centers comprises more than 40,000 cameras installed in public transport vehicles, businesses and shopping centers.There are two C5 video surveillance command centers: Toluca and Ecatepec de Morelos.Mexico as a whole operates 32 C5 command centers, according to Grupo Kabat, one of the private technology companies that developed the platform to operate them.On Sunday, Chihuahua state Secretary of Public Security Gilberto Loya filmed a tour of the newly inaugurated Torre Centinela in the border city of Juárez. It is Mexico’s first C7 command center, with the addition of “quality and communication” — calidad and comunicación in Spanish.The tower’s technology infrastructure is operated by surveillance corporation Seguritech, which has made $1.27 billion dollars off of the Mexican government’s security and surveillance apparatus.In August 2025, Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada announced the “Eyes That Look After You” surveillance plan that connected 30,400 cameras equipped with 360-degree vision to Mexico City’s C5 infrastructure. With these cameras, the capital became the most surveilled city in the Americas with 113,814 total cameras at the end of 2025.The government is promoting the use of these cameras connected to command centers not just in public spaces but in private homes and businesses, too.On Aug. 11, 2025, the Mexico City government announced an agreement with the ubiquitous convenience store chain, OXXO. Fifty of the store’s Mexico City locations were connected to C5 cameras, with more planned.Courthouse News reporter William Savinar is based in Mexico City.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads