Archive

Last week ended on the question nobody had answered: every law says check the age, and none of them says who gets to keep the picture. On 17 September the European Commission proposed an answer — a certified third party issues a yes-or-no attestation and the platform never sees the document. The hosts read the rest of it: AI companions are named in scope by definition, and the Act writes no penalties of its own at all — it borrows the DSA's for platforms, the AI Act's Chapter IX for companions and chatbots (where the 6% of worldwide turnover actually lives), and data protection law's for the age checks. None of it applies before 2028. Plus an AI agent that drives the toy and also holds the card, Meta's $18 billion settlement with a third of the money waiting on two rival companies, and $500,000 an image in Minnesota after two motions were denied.

2026-09-21 · ~18 min · 7 sourced items

Everyone on this beat is being told to check your age, and somebody has to keep the picture. Womanizer moves pleasure tech into the beauty hall at IFA; an AI couples "concierge" that talks privately to both partners out-raises a veteran sexual wellness brand's entire history; the GUARD Act would card every AI-companion account; OpenAI shelves the adult mode it promised verified adults; Ofcom fines a porn site £730,000 and makes clear that geoblocking late does not close the file; and 153 million scanned driver's licenses turn up for sale from an ID-verification vendor whose breach notice was set to hide from search engines.

2026-09-14 · ~14 min · 10 sourced items

Nothing on this beat closed this week, so the running order is the open threads. Lovense announces a four-to-eight-thousand-dollar AI companion doll that ships next year and remembers your conversations; a fourth analyst puts the market nineteen billion dollars away from the third on the same year; a wrongful-death suit against an AI-companion maker settles with terms undisclosed, leaving no record; the FTC's companion-chatbot orders pass a year with no report; San Francisco's twenty-eight-day deadline for the app stores lapses with no follow-up anyone published; Texas starts carding every app-store user at the door; and a sex-toy maker tells six hundred customers a hacker read their inbox, then declines to say whether MFA was on before.

2026-09-05 · ~17 min · 8 sourced items

A Colombian wearable sells out with no published decibel rating, four market-research firms can't agree on the industry's size within a hundred billion dollars, an unlocked server exposes 43 million private AI-girlfriend messages, Apple and Google keep "removed" nudify apps up until a city attorney makes them take them down, and a sex-toy CEO threatens the researchers who fixed his security bugs for free.

2026-08-31 · ~14 min · 6 sourced items