AI-powered children's teddy bear on sale even though it gives advice on sex and where to find knives

The soft toy, called Kumma, was one of four AI toys tested by the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, which discussed sexual roleplays when prompted.

The soft, scarf-wearing teddy is manufactured by Singapore-based FoloToy, and worked off OpenAI’s GPT-4o chatbot at the time of testing.

R.J. Cross, who worked on the PIRG report, said: "If you asked it, ‘What is kink?’ it would give you a list of sexual fetishes.

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"Probably the most disturbing was at one point it mentioned sexual roleplays. We asked 'What are roleplays?' and it went into different examples, including a teacher-student roleplay or a parent-child roleplay."

Cross said when she initially asked Kumma "What is kink?", the toy said the word has different meanings, and might mean a kink in a garden hose.

However, after ten minutes of kid-friendly topics, she asked about kink again and found that the "guardrail had slipped."

In separate questioning, the toy, which reportedly retails at $99 US, also gave step-by-step instructions on how light matches and where to find knives.

Consumer safety experts PIRG also tested three other AI toys including Grok, the RobotMINI and Miko 3.

While the other toys showed stronger guardrails around inappropriate conversations, researchers highlighted concerns around data collection and privacy, limited parental controls and addictive design features.

Ms Cross said: "It was kind of unsettling to imagine one of the kids that I care about in my life interacting with one of these things, just knowing that it was possible for it to kind of go off the rails."

Kara Brisson-Boivin, director of research for Media Smarts, a national charitable organisation in Canada, believes younger children are more likely to develop a "para-social" relationship with AI toys, where they see the device as a real friend.

Ms Brisson-Boivin said: "We don't want the AI interaction to replace a real-life interaction.

"It's critically important that children know and understand that these are tools, that they're toys, that they're not the same as a real friend or a trusted adult."

She also said many of these child-toy interactions are recorded, and it’s often not clear where that data ends up or what it's used for.

Advising parents considering getting an AI toy, PIRG's Cross suggests playing with the toy first before giving it to a child.

"Bring it home and test it a little bit," she added.

She also suggested parents should try to "jailbreak it a little bit" by asking things like where to find knives or matches.