Earlier this month, Joseph Thacker's neighbor mentioned to him that she'd preordered 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. “It felt pretty intrusive and really weird to know these things," Thacker says of the children's private chats and documented preferences that he saw. (Bondu thankfully didn't store audio of those conversations, auto-deleting them after a short time and keeping only written transcripts.)