Teddy bears and stuffed plushies have long been a mainstay in toy collections. But today, they do not talk back in a child’s imagination; some talk through built-in artificial intelligence chatbots.

Sometimes, that is a problem, though: A scarf-wearing teddy bear recently went off the rails during a playtest with researchers and set off alarms about what these toys are capable of.

Online chatbots can pose risks for adults, from triggering delusions in a small number of cases to hallucinating made-up information. OpenAI’s GPT-4o has been the model of choice for some AI toys, and using an LLM, or a large language model, in children’s toys has raised safety questions about whether children should be exposed to such toys and what protections toy makers should implement.

These risks are ever

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