An AI Toy Exposed 50,000 Logs of Its Chats With Kids to Anyone With a Gmail Account

AI chat toy company Bondu left its web console almost entirely unprotected. Researchers who accessed it found nearly all the conversations children had with the company's stuffed animals.

Earlier this month, Joseph Thacker's neighbor mentioned to him that she'd pre-ordered a couple of stuffed dinosaur toys for her children. She'd chosen the toys, called “Bondus,” because they offered an AI chat feature that lets children talk to the toy like a kind of machine-learning-enabled imaginary friend. But she knew Thacker, a security researcher, had done work on AI risks for kids, and she was curious about his thoughts.