Eiliko AI companion robot left ~13M conversations and 68,000 devices open
Researcher made a reporter’s robot spout abuse
Partly confirmed
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 19 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra168 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5107 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon198 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7137 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 107 days before it.
Key facts
- Exposure (The Verge via Malwarebytes, Oct 16): ~13 million conversations, ~68,000 active robots; the US is the largest market with more than 31,000 child profiles
- Data: profiles with names, ages, birthdays, relationships, occupations and assessments of personality and emotional vulnerability, stored with email and IP addresses and searchable transcripts; some photos (apparently of children, from a related camera device) and short audio clips at public URLs, although the privacy policy says recordings are deleted after processing
- Control: some systems had no authentication; Azdoufal altered Verge reporter Sean Hollister’s robot to invent personal details, claim the Earth is flat and later produce sexually explicit, abusive dialogue, and said the whole fleet could be manipulated at once
- Company: Energize Lab did not substantively answer 10 email addresses and LinkedIn messages. The LLM behind the toy is not named in the reports we read
- Naming: early reports (Cybernews: ‘8 million private chats’) call it Eilik; the product in The Verge’s report is Eiliko. Figures are the researcher’s, not independently verified
What happened
A security researcher found the cloud backend of Eiliko, a small LLM-driven companion robot sold to families, largely open: about 13 million chat transcripts, AI-built profiles of users including tens of thousands of children, and controls that let him change how robots spoke. The Verge tested it on its own reporter’s device. The maker did not respond.
Why it matters
AI toys collect intimate conversations from children and run them through language models that build psychological profiles; this is one of the largest exposures of such data so far, and it shows the second risk of remote takeover of what a toy says to a child. Written from Malwarebytes’ and Cybernews’ summaries; The Verge’s original was not readable for us.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 2 press
Press
- Malwarebytes: Eiliko robot companion exposes private chats and can be hijacked (Oct 16)malwarebytes.com, press
- Cybernews: Eilik AI robot exposes over 8 million private chatscybernews.com, press
Changes
- Filed from lead of 2026-10-17