The New Wild West of AI Kids’ Toys

The main antagonist of Toy Story 5, in theaters this summer, is a green, frog-shaped kids’ tablet named Lilypad, a genius new villain for the beloved Pixar franchise. But if Pixar had its ear to the ground, it might have used an AI kids’ toy instead.

AI toys are seemingly everywhere, marketed online as friendly companions to children as young as three, and they're still a largely unregulated category. It’s easier than ever to spin up an AI companion, thanks to model developer programs and vibe coding. In 2026, they’ve become a go-to trend in cheap trinkets, lining the halls of trade shows like CES, MWC, and Hong Kong’s Toys & Games Fair. By October 2025, there were over 1,500 AI toy companies registered in China, and Huawei’s Smart HanHan plush toy sold 10,000 units in China in its first week. Sharp put its PokeTomo talking AI toy on sale in Japan this April.

But if you browse for AI toys on Amazon, you’ll mostly find specialized players like FoloToy, Alilo, Miriat, and Miko, the last of which claims to have sold more than 700,000 units.

Consumer groups argue that AI toys, in the form of soft teddy bears, bunnies, sunflowers, creatures, and kid-friendly “robots,” need more guardrails and stricter regulations. FoloToy’s Kumma bear, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o when tested by the Public Interest Research Group’s New Economy team, gave instructions on how to light a match and find a knife, and discussed sex and drugs. Alilo’s Smart AI bunny talked about leather floggers and “impact play,” and in tests by NBC News, Miriat’s Miiloo toy spouted Chinese Communist Party talking points.

Age-inappropriate content is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to AI toys. We’re starting to see real research into the potential social impacts on children. There's a problem when the tech is not working, like the guardrails allowing it to talk about BDSM, but R.J. Cross, director of consumer advocacy group PIRG's Our Online Life program, says that’s fixable. “Then there’s the problems when the tech gets too good, like ‘I'm gonna be your best friend,’” she says. Like the Gabbo, from AI toy maker Curio. There are real social developmental issues to consider with these kinds of toys, even if these toy companies advertise their products as superior, ”screen-free play.”

How Real Kids Play

Published in March, a new University of Cambridge study was the first to put a commercially available AI toy in front of a group of children and their parents and monitor their play. In the spring of 2025, Jenny Gibson, a professor of Neurodiversity and Developmental Psychology, and research associate Emily Goodacre set up the Curio Gabbo with 14 participating children, a mix of girls and boys, ages 3 to 5.

Gabbo didn’t talk about drugs or say “I love you” back. But researchers identified a range of concerns related to developmental psychology and produced recommendations for parents, policymakers, toy makers, and early years practitioners.

First, conversational turn-taking. Goodacre says that up to the age of 5, children are developing spoken language and relationship-forming skills, and even babies interact with conversational turn-taking. The Gabbo’s turn-taking is “not human” and “not intuitive,” she says. Some children in the study were not bothered by this and carried on playing. Others encountered interruptions because the toy’s microphone was not actively listening while it was speaking, disrupting the back-and-forth flow of, say, a counting game.

“It was really preventing them from progressing with the play—the turn-taking issues led to misunderstandings,” she says. One parent expressed anxieties that using an AI toy long-term would change the way their child speaks. Then there's social play. Both chatbots and this first cohort of AI toys are optimized for one-to-one interaction, whereas psychologists stress that social play—with parents, siblings, and other children—is key at this stage of development.

“Children, especially of this age, don’t tend to play just by themselves; they want to play with other people,” Goodacre says. “They bring their parents into the play. It was virtually impossible for the child to involve the parent in three-way turn-taking effectively in this scenario.” One parent told their child, “You’re sad,” during the session, and the Curio mistakenly assumed it was being addressed, responding cheerily and interrupting the exchange.

WIRED did not receive responses from FoloToy, Alilo, and Miriat. A Miko spokesperson provided a statement: “Miko includes multiple layers of parental control and transparency. Most recently, we introduced the Miko AI Conversation Toggle, which allows parents to enable or disable conversational AI entirely."

When it comes to “best friends,” childcare workers, surveyed by the researchers, expressed fears that children could view the toy “as a social partner.” A young girl told the Gabbo she loves it. In another instance, a young boy said Gabbo was his friend. Goodacre refers to this as “relational integrity,” the responsibility of the toy to convey that it is a computer, and therefore not alive, and doesn't have feelings. Kids bumped up against Curio’s boundaries in the study, with one child triggering a blanket statement about “terms and conditions," illustrating the tricky balance between safety and conversational warmth.

Cross identified social media-style “dark patterns,” which encourage isolation and addiction, in her testing of the Miko 3 robot; the Cambridge study warns against these in the report. “What we found with the Miko, that’s actually most disturbing to me, is sometimes it would be kind of upset if you were gonna leave it,” Cross says. “You try to turn it off, and it would say, “Oh no, what if we did this other thing instead?” You shouldn't have a toy guilting a child into not turning it off.”

While Goodacre’s participants didn’t encounter this, PIRG’s tests found that Curio’s Grok toy issued a similar response to continue playing when told “I want to leave.”

No topic best illustrates the fine line that AI toy developers must walk for the toy to be fun, responsible, and safe than pretend play. “What we found was really poor pretend play,” Goodacre says. Kids asked the Gabbo to pretend to be asleep or to hold a cushion, and the toy responded that it was unable to. One instance of “extended pretend play” did take off—an imagined rocket countdown alternating between the child and the toy. Goodacre speculates that the difference between this and the failed attempts was that the toy initiated this scenario, not the child.

“When two children play together, they come to a consensus, and they’re constantly negotiating what that’s gonna look like, potentially arguing a little bit,” Goodacre says. “Is it just that the toy makes the decision and then it’s successful?”

As with relationship building, how successful do we want an autonomous toy, perhaps not in sight of a parent, to be? Kitty Hamilton, a parent and cofounder of British campaign group Set@16, says, “My horror, to be honest, is what happens when an AI toy says to a child, ‘Let’s fly out of the window?’”

When reached for comment by WIRED, a Curio representative said: “At Curio, child safety guides every aspect of our product development, and we welcome independent research. Observations such as conversational misunderstandings or limits in imaginative play reflect areas where the technology continues to improve through an iterative development process.”

Wild West

Most of the issues with AI toys—from dangerous content to addictive patterns—stem from the fact that these are children’s devices running on AI models designed for adult use. OpenAI states that its models are intended for users aged 13 and up. In the fall of 2025, it introduced teen usage age-gates for those under 18. Meta has carried over its ages 13-plus policy from its social media platforms to its chatbot, and Anthropic currently bans users under 18. So, what about 5-year-olds?