Kids can now lose a robot best friend the way previous generations lost a favorite stuffed animal—except this one shuts down when the company goes bust. In MIT Technology Review, Sara Harrison follows Moxie, a 15-inch AI “companion robot” pitched as a social-skills coach for neurodivergent kids. The blue, big-eyed bot helped 10-year-old Xander practice calming techniques and conversation, and is part of a wider push to use social robots as round-the-clock therapy aides. Early research suggests robots can boost eye contact and engagement, but studies are small, benefits may fade, and therapists warn autism support is too complex to hand off to a machine. The bigger twist comes when Moxie’s maker, Embodied, runs out of money.

Servers go dark, robots stop working, and children who treated Moxie as a confidant suddenly face a “death” engineered by a business model. As it turns out, the problem is not uncommon for such devices. “This is a big ethical question for robots that are specifically designed to be lovable, marketed to children who may form deep emotional bonds with them,” writes Harrison. Experts have only begun grappling with how to help kids with these “complicated goodbyes.” In the case of Moxie, the robot was briefly resurrected thanks to a second investor, but that company also folded. Xander’s parents are wrestling with how to explain. It seems they’d recently admitted to their son that they had been secretly replacing his dead fish for years, “and the conversation didn’t go well.” Read the full story.