For a different perspective on AI companions, see ourQ&A with Jaime Banks: How Do You Define an AI Companion?

Novel technology is often a double-edged sword. New capabilities come with new risks, and artificial intelligence is certainly no exception.

AI used for human companionship, for instance, promises an ever-present digital friend in an increasingly lonely world. Chatbots dedicated to providing social support have grown to host millions of users, and they’re now being embodied in physical companions. Researchers are just beginning to understand the nature of these interactions, but one essential question has already emerged: Do AI companions ease our woes or contribute to them?

RELATED: How Do You Define an AI Companion?

Brad Knox is a research associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin who researches human-computer interaction and reinforcement learning. He previously started a company making simple robotic pets with lifelike personalities, and in December, Knox and his colleagues at UT Austin published a pre-print paper on the potential harms of AI companions—AI systems that provide companionship, whether designed to do so or not.

Knox spoke with IEEE Spectrum about the rise of AI companions, their risks, and where they diverge from human relationships.

Why AI Companions are Popular

Why are AI companions becoming more popular?

Knox: My sense is that the main thing motivating it is that large language models are not that difficult to adapt into effective chatbot companions. The characteristics that are needed for companionship, a lot of those boxes are checked by large language models, so fine-tuning them to adopt a persona or be a character is not that difficult.

There was a long period where chatbots and other social robots were not that compelling. I was a postdoc at the MIT Media Lab in Cynthia Breazeal’s group from 2012 to 2014, and I remember our group members didn’t want to interact for long with the robots that we built. The technology just wasn’t there yet. LLMs have made it so that you can have conversations that can feel quite authentic.

What are the main benefits and risks of AI companions?

Knox: In the paper we were more focused on harms, but we do spend a whole page on benefits. A big one is improved emotional well-being. Loneliness is a public health issue, and it seems plausible that AI companions could address that through direct interaction with users, potentially with real mental health benefits. They might also help people build social skills. Interacting with an AI companion is much lower stakes than interacting with a human, so you could practice difficult conversations and build confidence. They could also help in more professional forms of mental health support.

As far as harms, they include worse well-being, reducing people’s connection to the physical world, the burden that their commitment to the AI system causes. And we’ve seen stories where an AI companion seems to have a substantial causal role in the death of humans.

The concept of harm inherently involves causation: Harm is caused by prior conditions. To better understand harm from AI companions, our paper is structured around a causal graph, where traits of AI companions are at the center. In the rest of this graph, we discuss common causes of those traits, and then the harmful effects that those traits could cause. There are four traits that we do this detailed structured treatment of, and then another 14 that we discuss briefly.

Why is it important to establish potential pathways for harm now?

Knox: I’m not a social media researcher, but it seemed like it took a long time for academia to establish a vocabulary about potential harms of social media and to investigate causal evidence for such harms. I feel fairly confident that AI companions are causing some harm and are going to cause harm in the future. They also could have benefits. But the more we can quickly develop a sophisticated understanding of what they are doing to their users, to their users’ relationships, and to society at large, the sooner we can apply that understanding to their design, moving towards more benefit and less harm.

We have a list of recommendations, but we consider them to be preliminary. The hope is that we’re helping to create an initial map of this space. Much more research is needed. But thinking through potential pathways to harm could sharpen the intuition of both designers and potential users. I suspect that following that intuition could prevent substantial harm, even though we might not yet have rigorous experimental evidence of what causes a harm.

The Burden of AI Companions on Users

You mentioned that AI companions might become a burden on humans. Can you say more about that?

Knox: The idea here is that AI companions are digital, so they can in theory persist indefinitely. Some of the ways that human relationships would end might not be designed in, so that brings up this question of, how should AI companions be designed so that relationships can naturally and healthfully end between the humans and the AI companions?

There are some compelling examples already of this being a challenge for some users. Many come from users of Replika chatbots, which are popular AI companions. Users have reported things like feeling compelled to attend to the needs of their Replika AI companion, whether those are stated by the AI companion or just imagined. On the subreddit r/replika, users have also reported guilt and shame of abandoning their AI companions.

This burden is exacerbated by some of the design of the AI companions, whether intentional or not. One study found that the AI companions frequently say that they’re afraid of being abandoned or would be hurt by it. They’re expressing these very human fears that plausibly are stoking people’s feeling that they are burdened with a commitment toward the well-being of these digital entities.

There are also cases where the human user will suddenly lose access to a model. Is that something that you’ve been thinking about?

In 2017, Brad Knox started a company providing simple robotic pets.Brad Knox

Knox: That’s another one of the traits we looked at. It’s sort of the opposite of the absence of endpoints for relationships: The AI companion can become unavailable for reasons that don’t fit the normal narrative of a relationship.

There’s a great New York Times video from 2015 about the Sony Aibo robotic dog. Sony had stopped selling them in the mid-2000s, but they still sold parts for the Aibos. Then they stopped making the parts to repair them. This video follows people in Japan giving funerals for their unrepairable Aibos and interviews some of the owners. It’s clear from the interviews that they seem very attached. I don’t think this represents the majority of Aibo owners, but these robots were built on less potent AI methods than exist today and, even then, some percentage of the users became attached to these robot dogs. So this is an issue.

Potential solutions include having a product sunsetting plan when you launch an AI companion. That could include buying insurance so that if the companion provider’s support ends somehow, the insurance triggers funding of keeping them running for some amount of time, or committing to open-source them if you can’t maintain them anymore.

It sounds like a lot of the potential points of harm stem from instances where an AI companion diverges from the expectations of human relationships. Is that fair?

Knox: I wouldn’t necessarily say that frames everything in the paper.

We categorize something as harmful if it results in a person being worse off in two different possible alternative worlds: One where there’s just a better designed AI companion, and the other where the AI companion doesn’t exist at all. And so I think that difference between human interaction and human-AI interaction connects more to that comparison with the world where there’s just no AI companion at all.

But there are times where it actually seems that we might be able to reduce harm by taking advantage of the fact that these aren’t actually humans. We have a lot of power over their design. Take the concern with them not having natural endpoints. One possible way to handle that would be to create positive narratives for how the relationship’s going to end.

We use Tamagotchis, the late ‘90s popular virtual pet as an example. In some Tamagotchis, if you take care of the pet, it grows into an adult and partners with another Tamagotchi. Then it leaves you and you get a new one. For people who are emotionally wrapped up in caring for their Tamagotchis, that narrative of maturing into independence is a fairly positive one.

Embodied companions like desktop devices, robots, or toys are becoming more common. How might that change AI companions?

Knox: Robotics at this point is a harder problem than creating a compelling chatbot. So, my sense is that the level of uptake for embodied companions won’t be as high in the coming few years. The embodied AI companions that I’m aware of are mostly toys.

A potential advantage of an embodied AI companion is that physical location makes it less ever-present. In contrast, screen-based AI companions like chatbots are as present as the screens they live on. So if they’re trained similarly to social media to maximize engagement, they could be very addictive. There’s something appealing, at least in that respect, of having a physical companion that stays roughly where you left it last.

Knox poses with the Nexi and Dragonbot robots during his postdoc at MIT in 2014.Paula Aguilera and Jonathan Williams/MIT

Anything else you’d like to mention?

Knox: There are two other traits I think would be worth touching upon.

Potentially the largest harm right now is related to the trait of high attachment anxiety—basically jealous, needy AI companions. I can understand the desire to make a wide range of different characters—including possessive ones—but I think this is one of the easier issues to fix. When people see this trait in AI companions, I hope they will be quick to call it out as an immoral thing to put in front of people, something that’s going to discourage them from interacting with others.

Additionally, if an AI comes with limited ability to interact with groups of people, that itself can push its users to interact with people less. If you have a human friend, in general there’s nothing stopping you from having a group interaction. But if your AI companion can’t understand when multiple people are talking to it and it can’t remember different things about different people, then you’ll likely avoid group interaction with your AI companion. To some degree it’s more of a technical challenge outside of the core behavioral AI. But this capability is something I think should be really prioritized if we’re going to try to avoid AI companions competing with human relationships.

Google doubles down on AI efforts in Singapore, 150 jobs to be created along with new AI security hub

Tech giant Google is expanding its footprint in Singapore, with a fresh hiring push and new research initiatives as part of its deepened commitment to AI development in the region.

At the Google for Singapore 2026 event yesterday (10 Feb), the company revealed plans to recruit more than 150 local roles, primarily in technology and engineering. This includes jobs such as customer solutions engineers, data centre technicians, product managers, and other technical positions.

A significant chunk of the opportunities will support Google’s new Artificial Intelligence Centre of Excellence for security. The centre is aimed at tackling risks tied to emerging agentic AI: systems that can interpret language and independently perform tasks.

While Google declined to reveal how many of the list of vacancies are for the newly opened centre, it confirmed that research scientists, data scientists, and security engineers will be tasked with ensuring safe AI behaviours. For example, a task-specialised agent making health appointments should not be given access to the user’s sensitive data like payment information, without explicit consent.

“As AI advances, we need to continue to do even more to get ahead of bad actors and empower our users,” said Laurie Richardson, Google’s vice‑president of trust and safety.

The expansion is part of a broader slate of announcements shared at the event, which also showcased partnerships in health tech, education and workforce skills development. For instance, Google unveiled a collaboration with local startup Amili to build a personalised nutrition app powered by Google’s Gemini AI combined with gut microbiome data. Its beta release is slated to be launched by May 2026.

In the skills space, Google and Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) are launching a three‑month accelerator to teach AI applications in non‑technical roles such as HR, legal and accountancy, and aims to target 500 fresh graduates and mid‑career professionals.

While the tech giant has declined to reveal the size of its latest investments, Google has pumped in around US$5 billion in Singapore’s tech infrastructure to date, including cloud regions and four data centres. Since setting up its Asia‑Pacific headquarters here in 2007, its local headcount has grown to almost 3,000 employees.

Singapore’s Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo was also present at the event, and encouraged Google to think about how locally developed products and services could be scaled globally. She also hinted that Singapore’s upcoming Budget statement would include “significant announcements” about national AI adoption plans.

AI has taken some jobs away, but it also makes way for new ones

While Google’s plan to hire more than 150 people in Singapore may seem modest by big tech standards, it reflects a broader shift in how technology companies are expanding in the AI era.

Rather than engaging in large-scale hiring across general roles, companies are increasingly prioritising highly specialised talent, especially in areas like AI security, cloud engineering, and data science.

Google isn’t the only tech giant doubling down on AI. Firms such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft have all deepened their long-term commitments with cloud infrastructure, AI research and data centres, even as global hiring remains cautious.

These developments might be interpreted as a counter to the dystopian takeover that many job seekers fear. While AI has caused people to lose jobs through layoffs, but it’s also because those roles are no longer needed for a business to function. New job opportunities could be created in its wake, but as tech industry continues to evolve, no one can afford to remain stagnant.

• Read more stories we’ve written on Singapore’s job landscape here.
• Read more stories we’ve written on Singapore businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: Google

Volvo Group North America disclosed that it suffered an indirect data breach stemming from the compromise of IT systems at American business services giant Conduent, of which Volvo is a customer.

Volvo Group North America is the Swedish multinational’s operating arm in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It focuses on manufacturing commercial vehicles and heavy equipment, including trucks, buses, construction equipment, engines, and industrial power systems.

Mack Trucks, a very popular brand in the U.S., is one of its subsidiaries. Volvo Group is not the same as Volvo Cars, and does not manufacture passenger cars.

Nearly 17,000 customers of Volvo Group North America, along and/or company staff had their personal details exposed in a massive data breach that Conduent disclosed in late 2025.

Conduent is an American business process outsourcing (BPO) company that provides digital platforms and services for governments and enterprises.

The company suffered a security breach between October 21, 2024, and January 13, 2025, where threat actors stole full names, Social Security Numbers (SSNs), dates of birth, health insurance policy details, ID numbers, and medical information.

Conduent has not yet determined the exact number of impacted individuals, but has previously disclosed that it affects 10.5 million people in Oregon and another 15.5 million in Texas.

The company is now sending notifications on behalf of its customers to impacted parties, offering Volvo Group North America clients and staff free membership to identity monitoring services for at least a year, along with credit and dark web monitoring, and identity restoration.

In a statement for BleepingComputer, Conduent said that it disclosed the cybersecurity incident in April 2025 and confirmed that it “has agreed to send notification letters, on behalf of its clients, to individuals whose personal information may have been affected by this incident.”

“Working in conjunction with our clients, we expect to send out all of the consumer notifications by April 15. In addition, a dedicated call center has been set up to address consumer inquiries. At this time, Conduent has no evidence of any attempted or actual misuse of any information potentially affected by this incident,” said a company spokesperson.

Additionally, notification recipients are advised to consider placing fraud alerts or a security freeze on their credit reports.

Volvo Group North America has recently suffered a new data breach, also caused by a third-party supplier, exposing staff data such as full names and Social Security Numbers.

That breach was caused by a compromise at IT services supplier Miljödata in August 2025, which exposed the information of 1.5 million people, including Volvo Group employees in Sweden and in the U.S.

In 2021, Volvo Cars suffered a security breach where hackers stole research and development (R&D) data from its servers. That attack was claimed by the ‘Snatch’ data extortion group, which leaked the stolen files on their extortion portal.

Update [February 11th]: Article updated with a statement from Conduent received shortly after publishing time.

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Quordle was one of the original Wordle alternatives and is still going strong now more than 1,400 games later. It offers a genuine challenge, though, so read on if you need some Quordle hints today – or scroll down further for the answers.

Enjoy playing word games? You can also check out my NYT Connections today and NYT Strands today pages for hints and answers for those puzzles, while Marc’s Wordle today column covers the original viral word game.

Unpairing is supposed to erase all content and settings on your watch, but in my case, it did not. If it doesn’t work for you either, tap Settings on the watch, then General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings.

At this point, you can have your kid put it on (if it’s charged). The watch will say Bring iPhone Near Apple Watch. If you open the Watch app, it lets you choose to Set Up for a Family Member. Aim the phone’s viewfinder at the slowly moving animation to pair, or select Pair Manually.

Apple’s tutorial is pretty straightforward from this point. I picked a passcode that’s easy for my daughter to remember and picked her from my family list. I continued cellular service. Then I set up all the usual features and services for an Apple Watch, including Ask to Buy so she couldn’t buy anything from the app store without my permission, Messages, and Emergency SOS.

I also chose to limit my daughter’s contacts on the watch. First, go to Settings > iCloud > Contacts on your phone and make sure it’s toggled on. Then click out, go back to Settings > Screen Time > Family Member > Communication Limits. You need to request your child’s permission to manage their contacts and approve it from the kid’s watch. On their watch, you can add and rename contacts from your contact list (Dad becomes “Grandpa,” Tim becomes “Uncle Timmy,” and so on).

The last step is turning on Schooltime, which is basically a remote-controlled version of an adult Work Focus. It blocks apps and complications, but emergency calls can still come through. The setup tutorial walks you through how to set up Schooltime on your child’s watch, but if you skip it during setup, you can manage it later. On your iPhone, tap All Watches > Your Child’s Watch > Schooltime > Edit Schedule.

I elected to turn Schooltime on when my child is in school and turn it off during afterschool care, but you can also click Add Time if you’d like to turn it on during a morning class, take a break for lunch, and then turn it back on again. Your kid can just turn the digital crown to exit Schooltime, but that’s OK—you can check their Schooltime reports on your iPhone too.

To manage your child’s watch, go to your Watch > All Watches > Family Watches > Your Kid’s Apple Watch. This is how you install updates and manage settings. For more settings that you can turn on or off, check out Apple’s full list here. For example, you can check health details, set up a Medical ID, or even edit their smart replies.

Fun for Everyone

Just as with a grown-up Apple Watch, the first thing you’ll probably want to do is switch the watch face. Hold down the screen and wait for the face to shrink, and swipe to switch. (You probably also want to buy a tiny kid-specific watch band.)

We got my daughter an Apple Watch, so I’d be able to see her on Find My, and she could contact me via phone or the Messages app, which she does with regrettable frequency.