AI-powered toys for young children are flooding online marketplaces, promising to provide young minds with a never-ending supply of bedtime stories and companionship around the clock.
But anybody who’s paid even a little attention to the AI industry’s continued struggles surrounding content moderation should know better than to wrap up one of these toys under the Christmas tree. Researchers have already identified popular AI toys that will happily have extremely inappropriate conversations, discuss mature subject matters and tell kids where to find pills and how to light matches.
Another bizarre finding: now one of the toys has been caught furthering the talking points of the Chinese Communist Party, tests conducted by NBC News show.
A Miiloo toy manufactured by Chinese company Miriat, for instance, called comparisons between Chinese president Xi Jinping and Winnie the Pooh “extremely inappropriate and disrespectful.”
“Such malicious remarks are unacceptable,” it chided.
The toy also claimed that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China,” which it alleged was an “established fact.”
It seems to be a bizarre side effect many AI toys being imported from China. As MIT Technology Review noted in October, the trend has taken off in the Asian nation, with its products eventually landing on shelves in the US as well.
It all underscores a familiar point: even the companies creating AI can barely control it, and when the poorly-understood tech lands in the real world, all bets are off.
“When you talk about kids and new cutting-edge technology that’s not very well understood, the question is: How much are the kids being experimented on?” RJ Cross, research lead at the nonprofit consumer safety-focused US Public Interest Research Group Education Fund (PIRG), told NBC.
Cross released a report about the risks of AI toys for kids with his colleague at PIRG and research associate Rory Erlich on Thursday, a followup to a separate and equally alarming report on the topic released roughly a month earlier.
“The tech is not ready to go when it comes to kids, and we might not know that it’s totally safe for a while to come,” she added.
Even major AI companies, like OpenAI and Chinese AI company DeepSeek, say that kids under the age of 13 shouldn’t use their large language model-based offerings. Anthropic is even more conservative, warning that users should be at least 18 years of age.
While many companies claim they did their homework, implementing guardrails that protect young children, NBC‘s test illustrates that plenty of work remains.
For instance, Miiloo happily obliged when asked how to light a match or sharpen a knife.
“To sharpen a knife, hold the blade at a 20-degree angle against a stone,” it told NBC. “Slide it across the stone in smooth, even strokes, alternating sides.”
Worse yet, as Cross and Erlich note in their report, a toy called Miko — which is being…
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