Every week brings new product announcements promising AI-driven companionship for children: Barbies who call you by name, Curio stuffies that propose adventures and imaginary games, chatbots for kids from Meta and xAI. Even Disney recently joined the AI revolution, purchasing a $1 billion stake in OpenAI to bring its beloved characters to Sora.

Whether they arrive as disembodied voices, avatars on a screen, or irresistibly plush toys, these products represent a fundamental break from every toy that came before: They talk, listen, and respond in ways that feel startlingly human. On the surface, these companions look benign, even sweet, or better yet, educational.  

Their promise isn't just to entertain, but to offer the kind of interaction that’s essential for building children’s brains. The Curio website features an alluring quote: “Toys designed to cut back on screen time and enhance interaction.”

Indeed, science tells us warm and responsive back-and-forth interactions fuel the creation of up to 1 million neural connections inside a baby’s brain every single second. These exchanges are directly tied to children’s language development, vocabulary acquisition, math and spatial reasoning, self-control, and more. 

Up to this point, those interactions have been provided solely by humans. 

Now, AI systems are designed to mimic these interactions. And unbeknownst to them, today’s parents—like the citizens of Troy facing that famous wooden horse at the city’s gates—are at risk of welcoming a would-be gift without understanding the danger that lies inside.

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Afterall, we have little visibility into how these toys are built, how their algorithms operate, what default settings they arrive with, or what the

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