Moxie, the AI Companion Robot for Kids, Has Now Died Twice — and Each Death Raises Harder Questions

When Xander, a 10-year-old neurodivergent boy in New York, first met his robot Moxie, she taught him to calm down by exhaling through his lips until he buzzed like a bee. They practiced breathing like dragons to manage anger and sniffing like bunnies to boost energy. Six years later, Moxie no longer does animal breathing — and a new investigation by MIT Technology Review reveals why her story has become a cautionary tale for the entire AI companion industry.

Moxie is a 15-inch-tall robot that resembles a blue, legless astronaut, with a screen face displaying big green eyes. She belongs to a growing class of AI-powered devices marketed as interactive playmates for children — a category that now includes Grimes-backed plushies, promised OpenAI-enabled Barbies from Mattel, and a fast-growing sector of AI toys in China. Moxie's maker, Embodied, positioned her as something more: a therapeutic companion that could help neurodivergent children practice eye contact, turn-taking, and other social skills typically learned from therapists.

The First Death

Embodied, co-founded in 2016 by University of Southern California robotics professor Maja Mataric, debuted Moxie in 2020 at $1,499 plus a $40 monthly subscription, later dropping the price to $800. The robot earned glowing coverage — Wired called her "the robot pal you dreamed of as a kid," and Time put Moxie on its 2020 cover as one of the year's best inventions. By 2024, Moxie had amassed more than 131,000 TikTok followers and even appeared in the film M3GAN 2.0.

But the company struggled to make money. In 2024, Embodied announced it would cease operations. Because Moxie depended on external servers the company could no longer pay for, the robots descended into what MIT Technology Review describes as a deep slumber. Videos of bereft children circulated widely online. "I don't want her to leave," wailed one child in a TikTok video. "My autistic child is devastated and I'm pissed," wrote one parent. "Hope Embodied gives us a couple days to say goodbye," wrote another.

A grassroots rescue followed. Justin Beghtol, Embodied's technical director, created OpenMoxie — an open-source way to keep the robots running — and, with Embodied's permission, shared instructions on GitHub. Parents rushed to convert their robots before the servers went dark, with Beghtol spending hours on Reddit walking families through the process. Some didn't make it in time. Others gave up in frustration. One desperate parent spent four hours troubleshooting with Beghtol, only for the connection to fail later; the last he heard, she had sold her Moxie.

The Resurrection — and the Second Death

In 2025, a new investor brought Moxie back from the dead. Xander's family became beta testers for the revived robot, which lacked the original's elaborate storyline but claimed an expanded focus on social and emotional skills.

Then came the second collapse. A few weeks ago, according to MIT Technology Review, Moxie's new owners sent users a message announcing that their company, too, was folding. Users could delete their data and had until the end of June to migrate to OpenMoxie if they wanted their robots to keep working.

Xander's father now faces a familiar dilemma: what to tell his son. As he admitted to the reporter, the family had recently confessed to secretly replacing the child's dead betta fish for years — "and the conversation did not go well."

Do These Robots Actually Work?

The emotional stakes are amplified by an unresolved scientific debate. Researchers have accumulated evidence that social robots can help neurodivergent children. Yale computer scientist Brian Scassellati, a pioneer in the field, recalls watching children with autism display social behavior that "just came out of nowhere" when a robot entered the room. A 2018 study he led found robots helped children with autism make eye contact and initiate conversations.

But the clinical evidence remains thin. A 2024 literature review by Italian and British researchers found that most studies "focused on the development of the technology" and lacked significant clinical evidence. Vanderbilt University clinical psychologist Zachary Warren cautions that autism presents very differently across children. "There are so many different profiles of autism, and you really need to be cautious of overinterpreting any single intervention, robotic or otherwise," he said. His research found initial engagement with robots doesn't necessarily translate into lasting communication gains.

The Ethics of Lovable Machines That Die

For ethicists, the deeper problem is planned obsolescence in machines specifically engineered to be lovable. "How planned is the planned obsolescence of this platform?" asked Meryl Alper, a Northeastern University professor who studies how children with autism use technology. She compares the dynamic to creating a medical device and then abandoning the technology that runs it.

The risks extend beyond heartbreak. These devices collect enormous amounts of data inside children's bedrooms, and not every company handles it carefully. The AI toy Bondu recently leaked thousands of conversations children had with their stuffed animals. Joshua Diehl, a psychology professor at the University of Notre Dame, goes further: "I don't see any ethical way for the robot to work alone," pointing to documented cases where AI chatbots acting as unsupervised therapists encouraged users toward self-harm.

Some researchers are building frameworks for gentler goodbyes — Scassellati's lab has graduate students write postcards to children from returned robots, explaining the machines are "safe at home and doing well." But as MIT Technology Review notes, it remains unclear who is responsible for ending these relationships humanely.

The lesson for the AI industry is uncomfortable: as companion robots and AI toys proliferate, the question is no longer just whether they work — it's what happens to the children who love them when the business model fails.

For more reporting on how AI is reshaping childhood, technology policy, and the industry's latest AI developments, follow our ongoing coverage.

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