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'Make This Delay Permanent,' Say Child Advocates After Mattel Halts Release of First AI-Powered Toy
"AI toys are not safe for kids," said a spokesperson for the children's advocacy group Fairplay. "They disrupt children's relationships, invade family privacy, displace key learning activities, and more."
Dec 16, 2025
As scrutiny of the dangers of artificial intelligence technology increases, Mattel is delaying the release of a toy collaboration it had planned with OpenAI for the holiday season, and children’s advocates hope the company will scrap the project for good.
The $6 billion company behind Barbie and Hot Wheels announced a partnership with OpenAI in June, promising, with little detail, to collaborate on "AI-powered products and experiences" to hit US shelves later in the year, an announcement that was met with fear about potential dangers to developing minds.
At the time, Robert Weissman, the president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, warned: “Endowing toys with human-seeming voices that are able to engage in human-like conversations risks inflicting real damage on children. It may undermine social development, interfere with children’s ability to form peer relationships, pull children away from playtime with peers, and possibly inflict long-term harm."
In November, dozens of child development experts and organizations signed an advisory from the group Fairplay warning parents not to buy the plushies, dolls, action figures, and robots that were coming embedded with "the very same AI systems that have produced unsafe, confusing, or harmful experiences for older kids and teens, including urging them to self harm or take their own lives."
In addition to fears about stunted emotional development, they said the toys also posed security risks: "Using audio, video, and even facial or gesture recognition, AI toys record and analyze sensitive family information even when they appear to be off... Companies can then use or sell this data to make the toys more addictive, push paid upgrades, or fuel targeted advertising directed at children."
The warnings have proved prescient in the months after Mattel's partnership was announced. As Victor Tangermann wrote for Futurism:
Toy makers have unleashed a flood of AI toys that have already been caught telling tykes how to find knives, light fires with matches, and giving crash courses in sexual fetishes.
Most recently, tests found that an AI toy from China is regaling children with Chinese Communist Party talking points, telling them that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China” and defending the honor of the country’s president Xi Jinping.
As these horror stories rolled in, Mattel went silent for months on the future of its collaboration with Sam Altman's AI juggernaut. That is, until Monday, when it told Axios that the still-ill-defined product's rollout had been delayed.
A spokesperson for OpenAI confirmed, "We don't have anything planned for the holiday season," and added that when a product finally comes out, it will be aimed at older teenagers rather than young children.
Rachel Franz, director of Fairplay’s Young Children Thrive Offline program, praised Mattel's decision to delay the release: "Given the threat that AI poses to children’s development, not to mention their safety and privacy, such caution is more than warranted," she said.
But she added that merely putting the rollout of AI toys on pause was not enough.
"We urge Mattel to make this delay permanent. AI toys are not safe for kids. They disrupt children's relationships, invade family privacy, displace key learning activities, and more," Franz said. "Mattel has an opportunity to be a real leader here—not in the race to the bottom to hook kids on AI—but in putting children’s needs first and scrapping its plans for AI toys altogether.”
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FTC Report Shows Profit-Hungry Tech Giants 'Harmful to Children and Teens'
"Online platforms use sophisticated and opaque techniques of data collection that endanger young people and put their healthy development at risk," said one children's advocate.
Sep 19, 2024
Child welfare advocates renewed calls for U.S. lawmakers to pass a pair of controversial bills aimed at protecting youth from Big Tech's "dangerous and unacceptable business practices" after the Federal Trade Commission published a report Thursday detailing how social media and streaming companies endanger children and teens who use their platforms.
The FTC staff report—entitled A Look Behind the Screens: Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services—"shows how the tech industry's monetization of personal data has created a market for commercial surveillance, especially via social media and video streaming services, with inadequate guardrails to protect consumers."
The agency staff examined the practices of Meta platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp; YouTube; X, formerly known as Twitter; Snapchat; Reddit; Discord; Amazon, which owns the gaming site Twitch; and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok.
"The report finds that these companies engaged in mass data collection of their users and—in some cases—nonusers," Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine said in the paper. "It reveals that many companies failed to implement adequate safeguards against privacy risks. It sheds light on how companies used our personal data, from serving hypergranular targeted advertisements to powering algorithms that shape the content we see, often with the goal of keeping us hooked on using the service."
The publication "also finds that these practices pose unique risks to children and teens, with the companies having done little to respond effectively to the documented concerns that policymakers, psychologists, and parents have expressed over young people's physical and mental well-being."
FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement that "the report lays out how social media and video streaming companies harvest an enormous amount of Americans' personal data and monetize it to the tune of billions of dollars a year."
"While lucrative for the companies, these surveillance practices can endanger people's privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms, from identify theft to stalking," she added.
Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard University published an analysis last December that revealed social media companies made nearly $11 billion in 2022 advertising revenue from U.S.-based users younger than 18.
According to the FTC report:
While the use of social media and digital technology can provide many positive opportunities for self-directed learning, forming community, and reducing isolation, it also has been associated with harms to physical and mental health, including through exposure to bullying, online harassment, child sexual exploitation, and exposure to content that may exacerbate mental health issues, such as the promotion of eating disorders, among other things.
The publication also flags "algorithms that may prioritize certain forms of harmful content, such as dangerous online challenges."
The report accuses social media companies of "willful blindness around child users" by claiming that there are no children on their platforms because their sites do not allow them to create accounts. This may constitute an attempt by the companies to avoid legal liability under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA). Last December, Khan
proposed sweeping changes to COPPA to address the issue.
Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay—a nonprofit organization "committed to helping children thrive in an increasingly commercialized, screen-obsessed culture"—said in a statement that "this report from the FTC is yet more proof that Big Tech's business model is harmful to children and teens."
"Online platforms use sophisticated and opaque techniques of data collection that endanger young people and put their healthy development at risk," Golin added. "We thank the FTC for listening to the concerns raised by Fairplay and a coalition of advocacy groups, and we call on Congress to pass COPPA 2.0, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, and KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, to better safeguard our children from these companies' dangerous and unacceptable business practices."
On Wednesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to advance COPPA 2.0 and KOSA, both of which were overwhelmingly passed by the Senate in July.
However, rights groups including the ACLU condemned KOSA, which the civil liberties organization warned "would violate the First Amendment by enabling the federal government to dictate what information people can access online and encourage social media platforms to censor protected speech."
In May 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on "the growing concerns about the effects of social media on youth mental health."
The White House simultaneously announced the creation of a federal task force "to advance the health, safety, and privacy of minors online with particular attention to preventing and mitigating the adverse health effects of online platforms."
Murthy has also called for tobacco-like warning labels on social media to address the platform's possible harms to children and teens.
According to a study published in January by the corporate power watchdog Ekō, in just one week that month there were more than 33 million posts on TikTok and Meta-owned Instagram "under hashtags housing problematic content directed at young users," including suicide, eating disorders, skin-whitening, and so-called "involuntary celibacy."
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Rights Groups Warn Senate-Passed Online Safety Bill 'Makes Kids Less Safe'
Sen. Ron Wyden echoed their concerns that "a future MAGA administration could still use this bill to pressure companies to censor gay, trans, and reproductive health information."
Jul 30, 2024
As the U.S. Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed legislation intended to better protect children on the internet, rights groups renewed their intense criticism of parts of the package.
The Senate voted 91-3 on the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act (KOSPA), which includes the Children's and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) as well as the controversial Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which opponents say "makes kids less safe."
KOSA requires online platforms to enable the strongest privacy settings for children by default as well as prevent and mitigate specific dangers to them. It also requires independent audits and research. Critics argue some provisions would "threaten young people's privacy, limit minors' access to vital resources, and silence important online conversations for all ages."
The trio who voted against the bill on Tuesday was Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime privacy advocate who said on social media last week that "the final version of this bill is improved" but he would still vote no.
"The changes that I, LGBTQ+ advocates, parents, student activists, civil rights orgs, and others have fought for over the last two years have made it less likely that the bill can be used as a tool for MAGA extremists to wage war on legal and essential information to teens," Wyden said.
"While constructive, these improvements remain insufficient," he continued. "I fear KOSA could be used to sue services that offer privacy technologies like encryption or anonymity features that kids rely on to communicate securely and privately without being spied on by predators online."
Wyden added that "I also take very seriously concerns voiced by the American Civil Liberties Union, Fight for the Future, and LGBTQ+ teens and advocates that a future MAGA administration could still use this bill to pressure companies to censor gay, trans, and reproductive health information."
The ACLU and Fight for the Future reiterated those concerns on Tuesday, joined at a press conference by leaders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, TransOhio, and Woodhull Freedom Foundation.
"We need legislation that addresses the harm of Big Tech. And still lets young people fight for the type of world that they actually want to grow up in," declared Evan Greer, director at Fight for the Future.
Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, said that "as state legislatures and school boards across the country impose book bans and classroom censorship laws, the last thing students and parents need is another act of government censorship deciding which educational resources are appropriate for their families."
The bill still needs to get through the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives. Already, two of the chamber's leading progressives, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) have come out against it. Leventoff declared that "the House must block this dangerous bill before it's too late."
Last week, the ACLU led over 300 students in a lobbying day on Capitol Hill to oppose the package.
"It's called the Kids Online Safety Act, but they have to consider kids' voices, and some of us don't think it will make us safer," Anjali Verma, a 17-year-old high school senior, said Tuesday. "We live on the internet, and we are afraid that important information we've accessed all our lives will no longer be available. We need lawmakers to listen to young people when making decisions that affect us."
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) celebrated the package's passage, joined by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), and Ed Markey (D-Mass.).
Cassidy and Markey spearheaded COPPA 2.0, which has not elicited criticism from rights groups the way KOSA has. They said in a joint statement that their bill's passage "is an overdue and much-needed victory" for young people and with the vote, "the Senate has sent a clear message that Big Tech's days of targeting and tracking kids and teenagers online are over."
"Enough with harmful targeted advertising," the senators said. "Enough with collecting deeply personal information on young people. Enough with ignoring the health and well-being [of] millions of young people. Enough with leaving teens and parents powerless to delete a mistaken social media post. Enough with lining Big Tech's pockets at the expense of our young people."
"To the parents, advocates, and young people who have been heroically fighting for these privacy protections for more than a decade, we thank you. We would not be here without your passion, commitment, and bravery," they added. "This vote is a breakthrough moment for tech regulation in the United States with Congress finally stepping up to the plate and putting real guardrails on Big Tech's pernicious business model."
Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay and co-founder of ParentsSOS, said that "today's historic vote is a testament to the tireless efforts of parents who have lost their children to Big Tech's greed and an incredible coalition that believes a better internet for young people is possible. We thank Sens. Blackburn, Blumenthal, Cassidy, and Markey for introducing this game-changing legislation and call on the House to follow the Senate's lead."
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