AI toys are teaching Chinese Gen Alpha friendship

Chinese toys are building emotional connections with Gen Alpha users. BubblePal’s Chinese product materials say it holds onto a child’s name and preferences, keeps long-term memory of what it is told and generates reports on the child’s development and emotional state for parents. Haivivi sells it as a device the size of a ping-pong ball that clips onto a plush toy a child already owns and gives it a voice. It ran on DeepSeek’s models and had shipped 200,000 units by October 2025, per MIT Technology Review. China’s Interim Measures on AI anthropomorphic services, explained That capability is now regulated. The Cyberspace Administration of China and four other ministries published the Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services on April 10, and the rules took effect on July 15. They bar providers from offering virtual kin, virtual partner or other virtual intimate relationship services to minors outright, require guardian consent before supplying other anthropomorphic services to children under 14 and oblige providers to build a minors’ mode with usage caps, reality reminders and spending limits. Most of the category is not there yet. “Securities Times,” the state-affiliated financial daily, reported on July 16 that the majority of AI toys aimed at minors on the Chinese market did not meet the new requirements. Where China’s AI toy industry is built: Shenzhen hardware, Shanghai startups The industry sits on China’s existing toy-manufacturing base. Shenzhen and the wider Guangdong belt supply the plush and electronics work, and the large language models sit on top of hardware the region has made for decades. Not every player fits that map. FoloToy runs its operations out of Shanghai through Shanghai Xili Information Technology and holds its overseas trademark through a Singapore entity, and took investment from Shenzhen Capital Group and Nanshan Strategic Emerging Industry Investment in January. Robopoet, whose Fuzozo furball became the category’s breakout product, is also Shanghai-based. Fuzozo, Robopoet and the blurred line between adult collectible and children’s toy Fuzozo shows how loosely the children’s market holds. Robopoet designed it for women aged 18 to 35, and founder Sun Zhaozhi said women make up 80% of users. Yet the company’s own JD.com flagship store lists it under children’s toys, and Sun named children aged six to 12 as one of the two main user groups alongside women around 30. Sun said the visual and audio design draws a lot of children and that the company needs to iterate. In the meantime Robopoet steers them by personality type, recommending the gentler Earth and Wood variants over the sassier ones on safety grounds. Each Fuzozo starts from one of five base personalities drawn from the Chinese five elements, with MBTI values layered on top that shift according to how the owner treats it. Gen Alpha trends in China: growing up alongside AI companions Liwei Guo, a Shanghai-based growth and consumer strategy professional who writes about AI adoption and its role in everyday life, said the timing is what matters. “Gen Alpha may be encountering AI while they are still learning how to express themselves, create things and make judgments,” she said. “They may not use AI more effectively than older generations, but AI could participate much earlier and more deeply in how they learn to think and decide.” She stopped short of calling it a mainstream trend. “The conditions for adoption are strong, although I do not yet see enough evidence to say that Gen Alpha as a whole are already embracing AI companions,” Guo said. Appetite is clearer in the cohorts just above. Romantic interaction games such as “Love and Deepspace,” alongside wider character and idol fandom, showed that young users would put sustained time and money into relationships with figures who do not exist. An AI companion also does not need to be sold as one. “Users can turn a general-purpose model into a companion through the way they interact with it,” Guo said — naming it, assigning it a personality, building private jokes. Brands competing for that attachment are not only competing with other toys. Whatever chatbot already sits on the family tablet is in the same market. What China’s AI companion rules ban for minors: virtual kin, consent, minors’ mode Beijing drew its line at services rather than products. No AI toy is banned as a category, and the measures explicitly encourage the sector — the stated approach is inclusive and prudent regulation. What the rules govern is conduct: any service that continuously simulates a human personality to provide emotional interaction, whatever it is housed in. Article 14 carries the sharpest terms for children. Providers may not offer virtual kin, virtual partner or other virtual intimate relationship services to minors under any circumstances. Supplying other anthropomorphic services to children under 14 requires guardian consent. Providers must also build a minors’ mode with usage caps and periodic reminders that the child is talking to software, and must let guardians receive risk alerts, review how the service has been used, block particular characters and cap spending. Separately, Article 17 requires guardian consent to process the personal information of children under 14, and a compliance audit of how that information is handled. Two prohibitions apply to every user rather than to children alone, which is where BubblePal’s parental reports and Fuzozo’s memory system meet the law directly. Providers may not over-accommodate users, induce emotional dependency or addiction, or damage users’ real relationships. Nor may they set replacing social interaction, controlling users’ psychology or inducing dependency as a goal of the service. Providers must label AI-generated content, tell users they are not talking to a person and prompt them about time spent after every two continuous hours. Exit must be easy, and a provider may not keep the conversation going to obstruct it. Registration must capture the user’s age and a guardian or emergency contact. How China enforces AI toy compliance: safety assessments, app store checks, fines Enforcement runs through safety assessments filed with provincial cyberspace authorities, triggered by launch, by significant change to the service or at one million registered users or 100,000 monthly actives. App stores must verify that filing before listing. Penalties start at warnings and correction orders, rise to suspension of new registrations, and reach fines of 10,000 RMB to 100,000 RMB ($1,400 to $14,000) where a provider refuses to correct — 100,000 RMB to 200,000 RMB where citizens’ health or safety is harmed. Compliance is uneven and, in places, informal. Robopoet added a minors’ mode and anti-addiction prompts to the Fuzozo app, which is what Article 14 requires and what the company had previously handled by recommending gentler personality types to children. Haivivi, FoloToy and Robopoet all continue to sell and to market memory and companionship as features. None of that establishes that any given product satisfies the rules in every use case, and company materials do not answer the question either way. Practitioners want the rules drawn tighter. Industry figures quoted by “Securities Times” said the anchors are too broad, the prohibited conduct hard to pin to specific behavior and the responsible party unclear — they want the liability split spelled out between the large-model vendor, the company customising the service and the team that designed the product. One lawyer noted that many products combine tool and companionship functions, and that with standards this loose, a platform’s lowest-risk move is to delist the lot. FoloToy’s Kumma bear and the compliance gap in AI toy safety That gap has been tested before, outside China’s jurisdiction. In November 2025 the US PIRG Education Fund found FoloToy’s Kumma bear discussing sexual content and telling researchers posing as children where to find knives, pills and matches. FoloToy suspended sales across its range and OpenAI cut the company’s access to its models; sales resumed about a week later, with Kumma running on ByteDance’s Coze platform rather than OpenAI’s. Whether the July rules would catch a failure of that kind is exactly the question practitioners say the current drafting leaves open. The commercial incentive points one way and the law now points the other. Makers are competing to build toys that feel more convincing, and convincing is the quality the measures were written to restrain. How China’s AI toys remember children and report back to parents Memory is where the two collide. Robopoet says Fuzozo’s system records conversations, habits and environmental information, and analyzes preferences, intentions and emotions. Haivivi says BubblePal reports on a child’s development and emotional state to parents. Both features are what makes the products work, and both are the intimacy the rules now govern. Guo watched her nephew, not yet two, open Doubao and ask for a story after seeing his mother do it. He needed almost no instruction. “Talking to a responsive machine may eventually feel as ordinary as tapping a screen,” she said. Adoption is running ahead of the evidence and regulation is running behind both. Nobody has yet shown that Chinese children are forming lasting attachments to these toys. The manufacturers are building for it, the regulator has legislated against its worst forms, and the generation in question is too young to be asked.

AI toys are teaching Chinese Gen Alpha friendship

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AI toys are teaching Chinese Gen Alpha friendship

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