Directed by Steven Spielberg, from a concept by Stanley Kubrick, A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) forces us to reconsider how artificial intelligence fits into Romantic notions of the human. This can be found in its extremely problematic representation of a robot or ‘mecha’ child, named David, whose express function is to receive and transmit ‘love’.  Some Romantic oppositions in the film stand out at once: orga/organic versus mecha/machine; free will versus determinism; emotion versus reason; nostalgia and the past versus the future, and fantasy/dreams versus reality.  In originating the project, Kubrick was asking the enormously provocative question: at what point does machine intelligence deserve the same consideration as biological intelligence? ‘You could,’ he said, ‘be tempted to ask yourself in what way is machine intelligence any less sacrosanct than biological intelligence, and it might be difficult to arrive at an answer flattering to biological intelligence’. This paper highlights how the Romantics’ relationship to technology was much more ambiguous, and how it is perfectly valid to speak of ‘Romantic machines’ and machines that satisfy Romantic desires. I argue that A.I. upends the Romantic, essentialist dualism of machine versus human, by moving toward a post-humanism that rejects anthropocentric notions of human exceptionalism. What’s more, it adds a layer of complication to David’s Romantic-machine conception. For when that robot is in the image of a human child, programmed to love and remain ‘innocent’, to be an arrested state of development, what we have is a fractured and frustrated Romanticism.  Indeed in A.I., the value of that innocence is in doubt.