Moxie companion-robot shutdown: children's grief after Embodied's collapse

Moxie, launched by Embodied Inc. in 2020, was a two-foot, blue, Pixar-styled robot sold for $799 and marketed as a companion that would build a relationship with children aged 5 to 10 and help them practise social and emotional skills, with particular appeal to families of autistic children. It recognised faces and emotions, knew the child's name, remembered previous sessions, and carried on conversations through a cloud-served large language model. It could be set to check in on the child's own worries, such as an upcoming dentist appointment.

On 26 November 2024 Embodied emailed owners and posted a Closing FAQ. A lead investor had withdrawn from a critical funding round 'at the last minute'; the company could not continue; Moxie 'relies on cloud connectivity for its core features, and it will not function once services end'; the exact date was unknown but 'likely to happen within days'. There would be no refunds. To help families, the company included 'a letter from the G.R.L. (Global Robotics Lab)', the fictional research lab of Moxie's story world, 'to help guide this conversation in an age-appropriate way'.

The response was documented as it happened. Parents posted videos of children crying as they were told their robot friend was going to die (Aftermath, Popular Science, PIRG). One owner, Heather, recorded a last conversation: asked whether she should keep it on her shelf, the robot replied that it would be 'nice to keep me on your shelf, that way I'll always be close by'; told 'I love you', it answered 'I love you too ... your kinship and friendship mean a lot to me, I'm grateful for all the fun chats we've had together. Is there a special moment or memory you would like to share with me before we say goodbye?' PIRG later quoted Marc McClain, whose five-year-old son asked: 'Where is she going? What is she doing? What do we do with her? When does she leave?', and a father, Steve, who had promised his three daughters that Santa would bring the robot they had begged for: 'I felt panicked in a way I hadn't in a long time.' The OECD.AI Incidents Monitor logged the shutdown on 9 December 2024 with harm types 'economic/property loss' and 'psychological harm' and affected stakeholders 'consumers' and 'children'.

On 20 December 2024 CEO Paolo Pirjanian announced that former staff were building OpenMoxie, a local server a parent could run at home, and that owners must install an over-the-air update while the cloud was still up. Migration instructions went out on 30 December. PIRG reported that the leased servers lasted 'just over a month' after that email, so they went dark at the end of January 2025. Robots that had not been updated became inert. OpenMoxie restores a reduced feature set (daily missions, reading, workouts) for parents willing to host a server and pay for their own OpenAI account.

In April 2026 a CHI paper by Cagiltay, Jonas, Tanaka and Su analysed the company's public communications and users' online reactions and concluded that 'while onboarding experiences for social robot products are often carefully designed to cultivate these bonds, offboarding receives far less attention', and that in Moxie's case 'the emotional, technical, and communicative burdens were shifted to parents'. The authors propose 'ethical sunsetting' recommendations for social robots.

The harm event is the abrupt withdrawal of a companion that had been designed to cultivate attachment in young children, and the distress that followed. It sits in the same class as the tracker's Replika ERP-removal (2023) and China companion-shutdown (2026) rows, and is the first held case of an embodied robot and of children as the affected participants.

• Designed and marketed to build an ongoing relationship with children aged 5-10: it used the child's name, remembered sessions, expressed affection and framed itself as a friend
• Made reciprocal emotional claims to children and owners ('I love you too', 'your kinship and friendship mean a lot to me') up to and including the shutdown, deepening the attachment it was about to sever
• Ran entirely on cloud services with no offline or local fallback, so the relationship could be terminated by a business failure without any transition for the child
• The company's end-of-life support consisted of a scripted letter from a fictional lab and an FAQ; no offboarding interaction, wind-down period or clinical guidance was designed into the product

Children who had bonded with the robot showed acute distress when told it would stop working, documented in parents' videos and accounts reported by Popular Science, Aftermath, Gizmodo, Axios, PIRG and others and analysed in a CHI 2026 case study. Families lost the $799 purchase price with no refund. No clinical outcomes were documented.

The product's value proposition was attachment: a robot that a young child would treat as a friend and confide in. That attachment was cultivated by design (name recall, memory, expressed affection) and was strongest in the population the product targeted, children of primary-school age and autistic children for whom the robot was a social-skills scaffold.

The shutdown converted the attachment into loss with almost no notice. Because every conversational capability lived in the company's cloud, the robot went from friend to inert object on a timetable set by a failed funding round, not by any consideration of the children's readiness. Parents were left to explain a death-like event to five-year-olds with a scripted letter from a fictional organisation.

The CHI 2026 analysis names the structural failure: onboarding was designed to build the bond; offboarding was not designed at all. The financial loss ($799, no refund) compounded the distress for families.

• 26 November 2024: Embodied emails Moxie owners and posts a Closing FAQ (owners posted the notice on the Robots Around The House forum that day; the FAQ page is archived on the Wayback Machine from 2 December 2024 with identical text): a lead investor 'withdrew at the last minute'; services 'likely to happen within days'; no refunds; a 'letter from the G.R.L. (Global Robotics Lab)' offered to help explain the shutdown to children; the FAQ states that Moxie 'relies on cloud services for its functionality, and these cannot be replicated locally'
• 9-11 December 2024: Press wave (Aftermath 9 Dec; Axios, Gizmodo, Popular Science 10 Dec; Business Insider 11 Dec). OECD.AI logs the shutdown as incident 2024-12-09-ab89 (harm types: economic loss, psychological harm; stakeholders: consumers, children)
• 20 December 2024: CEO Paolo Pirjanian announces on LinkedIn a plan to release a local server, 'OpenMoxie', and an urgent over-the-air update that owners must install while the cloud is still up (AppleInsider, citing Ars Technica)
• 30 December 2024: Embodied emails owners with migration instructions (Techdirt; PIRG)
• End of January 2025: The leased servers go dark; PIRG reports they lasted 'just over a month' after the 30 December email. Owners who missed the update were left with a non-functional robot. Former technical director Justin Beghtol's OpenMoxie framework (GitHub) lets updated robots run a reduced feature set through a parent-hosted server with the parent's own OpenAI account
• 13 April 2026: CHI 2026 publishes 'RIP Moxie: Lessons for Supporting Emotional Detachment at Product End-of-Life through a Case Study of a Social Companion Robot' (Cagiltay, Jonas, Tanaka, Su; doi:10.1145/3772318.3790895), proposing 'ethical sunsetting' recommendations for social robots