Miko, a company that makes toys powered by artificial intelligence, is including an AI on-off switch for its core technology after political pressure and investigations into their products.
The new option, following public criticism, is a rare fix that allows consumers to opt out of AI as companies of all stripes quickly incorporate the technology into their products.
“Miko puts full control in the hands of parents and caregivers with an ON/OFF toggle option to enable or disable the AI chat features of Miko 3 and Miko Mini,” the company announced in a press release on Monday.
Miko moving toys are robots with touchscreen faces, which can play music and games with children and use AI chatbots, called Large Language Models (LLMs), to communicate with children. The company has partnered with Google, according to a 2024 blog post, to use Google Cloud and Google’s Gemini AI models.
Recently, Miko has come under scrutiny and political pressure, with watchdogs and politicians raising safety concerns about Miko and other AI toy creators.
Last week, Sens. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said they had identified a website where any visitor could download thousands of answers Miko had created for specific children. It appears to have been accidentally left on the Internet with no password protections or other safeguards and can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection.
NBC News listened to other recordings, including what appeared to be extended conversations in which LLM repeatedly addressed the child by name and asked them questions such as how they were feeling and what music they were listening to. This place was inaccessible last week.
The CEO of Miko, Mr. Sneh Vaswani, in a statement sent by email to NBC News at the time, said that the company did not leak user information and does not store children’s recorded voices, but did not directly comment on the recordings that appeared to be children’s responses.
Sen. Blackburn responded to news of the AI shutdown in a statement, saying, “These new parental controls are an eleventh-hour effort to save face following the cybersecurity breach that emerged last week where the company exposed sensitive data involving children to the public. Parents should think twice before buying this toy for their children regardless of the latest version of the news.”
Ritvik Sharma, Miko’s senior VP of Growth, declined to respond directly to Blackburn but said the new feature “has been in the works for some time” and that audio responses posted online “were not related to us making that announcement.”
AI toys, and the chatbots that power them, are largely unregulated in the US.
Toy makers often use safeguards to prevent them from saying inappropriate things to children. But all LLMs are vulnerable to “jailbreaks,” or phrases that can convince a chatbot to ignore its developers’ instructions.
In December, an NBC News investigation found that some of the best-selling AI toys in the U.S. may be prompted in some cases to say things that parents might find disturbing or questionable, including descriptions of sexual acts or descriptions of the country’s politics closely aligned with the Chinese Communist Party.
The AI toy market is booming, especially in China. MIT Technology Review reported last year that the company has more than 1,500 registered AI toy companies.
