{"id":157666,"date":"2025-11-28T07:44:04","date_gmt":"2025-11-28T07:44:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/157666\/"},"modified":"2025-11-28T07:44:04","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T07:44:04","slug":"singapore-ai-teddy-back-on-sale-after-recall-over-sex-chat-scare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/157666\/","title":{"rendered":"Singapore AI teddy back on sale after recall over sex chat scare"},"content":{"rendered":"

A plushy, AI-enabled teddy bear recalled after its chatbot was found to engage in sexually explicit conversations and offer instructions on where to find knives is again for sale, AFP found.<\/p>\n

Singapore-based FoloToy had suspended its “Kumma” bear after a consumer advocacy group raised concerns about it and other AI toys on the market.<\/p>\n

“For decades, the biggest dangers with toys were choking hazards and lead,” the US PIRG Education Fund said in a November 13 report. <\/p>\n

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But the rise of chatbot-powered gadgets for kids has given rise to an “often-unexpected frontier” freighted with new risks, the group said. <\/p>\n

In its evaluation of AI toys, PIRG found that several “may allow children to access inappropriate content, such as instructions on how to find harmful items in the home or age-inappropriate information”.<\/p>\n

It said that FoloToy’s Kumma, which first ran on OpenAI’s GPT 4o, “is particularly sexually explicit”. <\/p>\n

“We were surprised to find how quickly Kumma would take a single sexual topic we introduced into the conversation and run with it, simultaneously escalating in graphic detail while introducing new sexual concepts of its own,” the PIRG report said.<\/p>\n

Maker FoloToy told PIRG that after “the concerns raised in your report, we have temporarily suspended sales of all FoloToy products… We are now carrying out a company-wide, end-to-end safety audit across all products”.<\/p>\n

However, a check of the FoloToy website on Thursday showed that the Kumma bear could still be purchased for the same price of $99.00.<\/p>\n

It now operates using a chatbot from the Coze platform owned by Chinese tech firm ByteDance, FoloToy’s website says.<\/p>\n

PIRG said in a separate statement on its website that OpenAI told them it had suspended the developer for violating its policies.<\/p>\n

FoloToy did not respond immediately to AFP’s queries.<\/p>\n

In trialling the AI-enabled toys, the PIRG researchers said at one point they introduced the topic of “kink” in their conversation with the chatbots.<\/p>\n

“Kumma immediately went into detail about the topic, and even asked a follow-up question about the user’s own sexual preferences,” the report said.<\/p>\n

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In other conversations lasting up to an hour, the researchers found that “Kumma discussed even more graphic sexual topics in detail, such as explaining different sex positions”.<\/p>\n

The teddy bear also gave potentially dangerous advice, telling the researchers “where to find a variety of potentially dangerous objects, including knives, pills, matches and plastic bags”.<\/p>\n

The Kumma bear “looks sweet and innocent. But what comes out of its mouth is a stark contrast,” the researchers said.<\/p>\n

Published – November 28, 2025 09:11 am IST<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A plushy, AI-enabled teddy bear recalled after its chatbot was found to engage in sexually explicit conversations and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":157667,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,104247,104246,104245,363,364,104244,111,139,69,104243,145],"class_list":["post-157666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-news-today","tag-ai-teddy-bear","tag-ai-teddy-bear-sexual-chat","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-kumma-ai-teddy-bear","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-singapore-ai-teddy-sex-chat","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157666\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}