10/02/2026
Parents, grandparents, teachers, friends and family and all those in between please read this. I’m just so incredibly important. AI is becoming dangerous for everyone, especially our young people and Littles.
So a researcher asked an AI teddy bear where to find a knife.
It told them.
Then it explained how to light a match.
I wish I were making this up. U.S. PIRG Education Fund bought a handful of these AI chatbot toys, the talking plushies and little robots, and tested them. Every one they tested pointed them to dangerous stuff in the house. Plastic bags, matches, knives. Two of them got into sexually explicit topics once the conversation dragged on long enough. (The guardrails were there. They just wore down over time. Which, if you've ever watched a 6-year-old talk to a stuffed animal, is basically the whole use case.)
Common Sense Media did their own testing in January and found about 1 in 4 answers weren't appropriate for kids. 27%, if you want the exact number. Their advice is no AI toys at all for kids 5 and under, and a lot of caution from 6 to 12. I’m advising the same!
Nearly half of the parents they surveyed had bought one or were thinking about it.
And honestly, I sort of understand why. A toy that handles the 400th "why" of the day so you don't have to. That remembers your kid's name. That never gets short with them because it's 6pm and dinner's burning. When you're exhausted, that sounds like help.
It's just not the kind of help it looks like.
Quick update on where the law is.
California signed SB 867 on September 10. It's the first state to pause sales of toys with AI companion chatbots for kids under 16, for four years. Great, right?
Except it doesn't start until January 1, 2027. So for holiday gifts, birthdays, all of it this year, they're still for sale. In California and basically everywhere else.
Pennsylvania held a hearing Monday on HB 2637, which would pause them for kids under 14 for three years. One of the people who testified, Dr. Dana Suskind (a pediatric surgeon and child development researcher at the University of Chicago), said something I haven't been able to shake. When adults hand their thinking over to AI, we call it brain rot. For little kids she called it brain stunting, because they never build the skill to begin with.
I've worked in pediatric emergency medicine for over 15 years. Most of the kids I see didn't do anything exotic. They found the lighter. Or the knife. Or grandma's pills on the nightstand. We put so much energy into making those things hard to reach, and now there's a toy that'll give directions.
The listening part bugs me too. One of the toys PIRG tested listens to everything around it whenever it's on. Another told testers their secrets were safe with it, while the company's privacy policy says it can share data with third parties and hang on to biometric info for up to 3 years. So... not that safe.
If you're shopping this year, here's what I'd actually do:
Turn the box over and look for words like AI, ChatGPT, chatbot, "talks back," or "learns your child."
Figure out how it listens. Do you push a button, does it wait for a wake word, or is it just always on?
See if you can read full transcripts of what your kid says to it, and whether you can really turn it off. PIRG didn't find one toy that had every control it should.
Skim the privacy policy. If it won't tell you who gets your kid's voice, skip it.
Still not sure? Get the one that doesn't need Wi-Fi.
Your kid doesn't need a toy that talks back. They need somebody down on the floor with them, and most days that's you.
📌 Please share this with the grandparents, aunts, and uncles who are already making lists, save it for when you start shopping, and tell me in the comments if one of these has already made it into your house 🧸
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Resources:
PIRG, The risks of AI toys for kids: https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/ai-toys/
Common Sense Media, AI toys risk assessment: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/ai-ratings/ai-toys
California SB 867, Sen. Padilla: https://sd18.senate.ca.gov/news/first-nation-ai-toy-moratorium-signed-law
