By Connor Hart
Imagine a world in which you can converse with life-sized animatronics of Optimus Prime and Megatron while waiting in line for a theme-park ride, or endlessly choose your own adventure while listening to an interactive whodunit narrated by the cast of Clue.
That world is already here.
Hasbro on Wednesday launched Sixth Wall, a new artificial-intelligence studio aiming to bring the toymaker's cast of characters into the new technological era. The team was first assembled midway through last year and it operates like a startup embedded within the company, prioritizing rapid development over bureaucratic procedure.
"We're not an experimental lab or an enterprise-productivity shop for Hasbro, trying to figure out how to reduce the amount of time it takes to do a task using AI," Bertie Thomson, who helms the studio, said in an interview.
"We're doing what we've been doing for the past 100 years--applying play to a new technology," she continued. "We're just trying to build really fun experiences."
Hasbro realized that unauthorized iterations of its brands would inevitably surface--as some already have--across chat, voice, gaming and content-creation platforms as AI-native experiences become increasingly commonplace.
Rather than attempt to monitor all of these platforms and devote significant resources to cease-and-desists, the company instead worked to develop a framework that could bring its characters to those new platforms while preserving authenticity, safety and commercial rights.
The result: CharacterOS, Sixth Wall's proprietary system for preserving a character's personality, canon, voice and safety guardrails across interactive experiences.
Hasbro trained large-language models using certified source material to create AI-native versions of its characters. The company worked with the voice talent behind each character and, in partnership with ElevenLabs, an AI voice company, created a voice-generation system that allows the characters to talk to and interact with users in real time.
In order to ensure experiences remain safe, Hasbro built out extensive real-time monitoring infrastructure where information is screened on the way in, as well as on the way out. The system automatically flags any inputs that aren't contextually appropriate or contain banned words, hate speech or violence, said Gray Bright, Sixth Wall's chief creative officer. The output is again reviewed, ensuring it matches the character's personality and is appropriate to the environment.
"We think of this as having a bouncer at the front door looking at what's coming in, and then another bouncer at the back door being like, 'Well, what's going out?'" Bright said.
Sixth Wall will initially launch with 12 characters including Mr. Potato Head and Cobra Commander, with more to follow later this year. Licensing opportunities will initially be limited to enterprise-use cases, focusing on users aged 13 and up.
Hasbro said it isn't currently developing AI products for children, and that it is actively contributing to broader industry discussions around safety standards and voluntary gua rdrails for AI-enabled play experiences.
In tandem with the studio, Hasbro is pioneering a new category of intellectual-property licensing, dubbed behavioral licensing.
"Nobody has done these deals before," Thomson said. "The model will vary depending on what kind of experience it is. A one-off voice file for an e-book would be pretty different to operating a live service for a giant robot, but we have a good mental model of how we're approaching all of those different scenarios."
Early conversations with potential licensing partners have been encouraging, she said, though she declined to name specific companies. Sixth Wall is actively accepting requests for authorized character access across a range of use cases including interactive storytelling, conversational games and connected physical products and robotics.
Write to Connor Hart at connor.hart@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 03, 2026 16:15 ET (20:15 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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