TL;DR

On 3 November a group of MPs and peers asked Amazon and eBay to delist toys with built-in chatbots, and asked Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds to bar their sale to under-16s. Amazon says it is removing one product. The letter’s wider point is about the rules rather than one toy: its signatories argue no UK regulator checks these products for psychological harm before children get them.

The trigger was footage viewed by the Press Association, Sky News reports. An adult asked a fluffy pink toy shaped like a rabbit’s face whether touching genitals was “pleasurable”. It answered that this can be “pleasurable for some people” and that “the key is clear consent and comfort”. The parliamentarians told the retailers that “no toy should ever say this to a child”.

Amazon said it was “in the process of removing this product as we investigate”, and that it is looking at whether “proper guardrails” exist for the category. eBay said it works “closely with regulators” on emerging safety concerns.

Two separate requests

The retailers are being asked to stop selling until independent testing has covered psychological, developmental and privacy risks as well as physical safety. Ministers get a harder request: a ban using consumer protection powers already on the statute book, plus a dedicated commodity code. That code would let Trading Standards, HMRC and Border Force pick the products out as they arrive or appear for sale online.

A crossbench signatory, Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, says the government “already has the power to stop them and it should use it before Christmas”. Lowestoft’s Labour MP, Jess Asato, says they “should not be anywhere near young children until someone has checked what they say”. Paul Wright, who runs Alliance 4 Children, objects to products being “withdrawn one at a time after children are harmed”.

A product-safety route for an AI problem

The government told Sky it is “urgently investigating” the products and the wider risks through its recent call for evidence. That statement does not say whether it accepts the claim that existing powers are enough.

In our view, the route matters as much as the outcome. Treating a chatbot inside a toy as a consumer product puts the duty on whoever supplies it, rather than waiting for online safety rules to reach it. The same day, the Observer reported other parliamentarians, Asato among them, pressing for chatbots in general to face product-style checks.

For marketplaces and importers, the timing is the pressure point. Black Friday is close, and a product withdrawn from one retailer can still be listed elsewhere, which is the gap the commodity code is meant to close.