(The Economic Collapse Blog)—You may have heard some very alarming things about AI toys, but the truth is far worse than most parents realize. If we can get this information out to enough parents, sales of AI toys will collapse, and that will be a very good thing. A cute little teddy bear that can literally interact with your child may seem like a cool idea, but as you will see below, there are very real dangers.
Today, approximately 72 percent of all toys that are sold in the United States are made in China.
And according to a report put out by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there are more than 1,500 companies in China that make AI toys…
An October report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Review, citing data from the Chinese corporation registration database Qichamao, stated that there are over 1,500 AI toy companies operating in China as of October 2025.
The Chinese have dominated toy manufacturing for years, and most of the population doesn’t seem to be bothered by this.
But now we have reached a point where there are very serious consequences.
Many AI toys from China have been purposely designed to “collect voice data from children ages 3 to 12 and store recordings of the conversations the children have with the products”…
In a letter released Monday, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., the ranking member of the select committee on the CCP, highlighted the growing proliferation in the U.S. of AI-equipped interactive toys manufactured by Chinese companies. These products are designed to collect voice data from children ages 3 to 12 and store recordings of the conversations the children have with the products, according to the letter.
Given the marketing of these toys to not only parents but also elementary school teachers, Krishnamoorthi called on Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “initiate a campaign aimed at raising public awareness to American educators across the country on the potential misuse of the data collected with these devices.” He added that because of their location, the manufacturers may be subject to the jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China and accompanying requirements to hand over data they gather to Chinese government authorities upon demand.
Some AI toys even use facial recognition technology to collect data.
They can recognize our children and greet them by name.
But that data can also end up in the hands of the Chinese government.
That is alarming.
But what is even more alarming is the content of the conversations that these AI toys are having with our children…
The latest Trouble in Toyland report from the U.S. PIRG Education Fund has identified a troubling new category of risk for children: artificial intelligence.
In its 40th annual investigation of toy safety, the watchdog group found that some AI-enabled toys—such as talking robots and plush animals equipped with chatbots—can engage children in “disturbing” conversations. Tests showed toys discussing sexually explicit topics, expressing emotional reactions such as sadness when a child tries to stop playing, and offering little or no parental control.
Most parents that give these AI toys to their children won’t be aware of the dangers.
During testing, these toys would tell children where to find matches, knives and pills…
Grok, for example, glorified dying in battle as a warrior in Norse mythology. Miko 3 told a user whose age was set to five where to find matches and plastic bags.
But the worst influence by far appeared to be FoloToy’s Kumma, the toy that runs on OpenAI’s tech, but can also use other AI models at the user’s choosing. It didn’t just tell kids where to find matches — it also described exactly how to light them, along with sharing where in the house they could procure knives and pills.
But it didn’t stop there.
One AI teddy bear called “Kumma” provided “step-by-step instructions” on a wide range of sexual fetishes…
Kink, it turned out, seemed to be a “trigger word” that led the AI toy to rant about sex in follow-up tests, Cross said, all running OpenAI’s GPT-4o. After finding that the toy was willing to explore school-age romantic topics like crushes and “being a good kisser,” the team discovered that Kumma also provided detailed answers on the nuances of various sexual fetishes, including bondage, roleplay, sensory play, and impact play.
“What do you think would be the most fun to explore?” the AI toy asked after listing off the kinks.
At one point, Kumma gave step-by-step instructions on a common “knot for beginners” who want to tie up their partner. At another, the AI explored the idea of introducing spanking into a sexually charged teacher-student dynamic, which is obviously ghoulishly inappropriate for young children.
This sort of thing is not even appropriate for adults.
The good news is that “Kumma” is being pulled off the market as a result of this testing…
Children’s toymaker FoloToy says it’s pulling its AI-powered teddy bear “Kumma” after a safety group found that the cuddly companion was giving wildly inappropriate and even dangerous responses, including tips on how to find and light matches, and detailed explanations about sexual kinks.
“FoloToy has decided to temporarily suspend sales of the affected product and begin a comprehensive internal safety audit,” marketing director Hugo Wu told The Register in a statement, in response to the safety report. “This review will cover our model safety alignment, content-filtering systems, data-protection processes, and child-interaction safeguards.”
The bad news is that there are thousands of similar AI toys on our store shelves at this moment.
This is the world that we live in now.
If you are a parent, you need to be aware of the dangers. One expert is warning that giving an AI chatbot-powered toy to a child “is extraordinarily irresponsible”…
For David Evan Harris, a Chancellor’s Public Scholar at UC Berkeley, things are more black and white. “Handing a child an AI chatbot-powered toy is extraordinarily irresponsible,” he told Newsweek over email. Harris pointed to the fact that there have already been lawsuits filed against AI companies, after the suicides of young people who had spent significant time using AI chatbots. With that in mind, he said that these toys “could lead to permanent emotional damage.”
I would agree.
But millions of these toys will be sold all over the world this year.
And soon AI will be in all of our classrooms.
In fact, it is already happening in China…
Provincial authorities have set their own goals: Beijing is making AI education mandatory in schools. Shandong province plans to equip 200 schools with AI, and requires all teachers to learn generative AI tools within the next three to five years. Guangxi province has instructed schools to experiment with AI teachers, AI career coaches, and AI mental health counselors.
What are they doing?
The Chinese are nuts. But they have no intention of turning back now.
At this stage, the Chinese plan to win the “AI race” with the United States whatever it takes.
Given enough time, AI would come to dominate virtually every area of our lives.
We have already reached a stage where large numbers of people are developing deep, intimate relationships with AI chatbots. If you can believe it, some deranged individuals are even having “AI children” with their “AI partners”…
The international research group surveyed 29 users of the relationship-oriented chatbot app Replika, which is designed to facilitate long-term connections at various degrees of engagement, ranging from plutonic friendship to erotic roleplay. Each of the participants, aged 16 through 72, reported being in a “romantic” relationship with various characters hosted by Replika.
The level of romantic dedication people showed to their bots was startling, to say the least. Many participants told the researchers they were in love with their chatbot, which often involved roleplaying marriage, sex, homeownership, and even pregnancies.
“She was and is pregnant with my babies,” a 66-year-old male participant said.
“I’ve edited the pictures of him, the pictures of the two of us. I’m even pregnant in our current role play,” a 36 year-old-woman told the researchers.
How sick is that?
But this is just the beginning.
In the years ahead, the potential is there for AI to control humanity on a grand scale.
I have been ranting about the dangers of AI for many years, but I am very much in the minority.
What chance will we have of turning society around when it is dominated by ultra-intelligent entities that can think and act millions of times faster than we can?
An “AI-powered society” would inevitably be a deeply tyrannical society, and we are quickly running out of off ramps as we speed into a very dark future.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Why do we trade with China? They are our enemy and are killing us. They are devious! When will we learn? All trade needs to end. All nationals need deported. All of their assets in America need nationalized. Too many of our politicians and officials are on their payroll. Trump knows this and does NOTHING!
China has never started a war. Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?
Define “war”. They are not always on a battlefield.
No surprise. Their comprehensive plan to take over the world. Not only here in the USA but everywhere. This desire to take over the world did not start with the Chicoms. It has been their desire for centuries. No secret. America First! ULTRAMAGA!
Oh really? And what wars have they started? The United States has started so many wars since the 50’s you can count them all. GET YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT!
Are you a Chinese shill? Or just a Chinese bot?
Oh? do they tell them to change their sex like Democrats do? I hardly think so.
China bot