Aristotle wasn’t the first electronic device to come under fire — Mattel also was criticized when it released the Wi-Fi interactive Hello Barbie in 2015 — and it very likely won’t be the last.

James Steyer, founder and chief executive of the nonprofit organization Common Sense, noted that breaches to children’s privacy can and do happen. For instance, the game and toy manufacturer VTech experienced a breach in 2015 in which nearly five million parent accounts and six million student accounts were compromised, including names, emails, addresses, usernames and passwords.

Even though Aristotle didn’t make it to market, Mr. Steyer said he is concerned that “the next version will look more like a toy — say, placed inside a cute teddy bear — and then it will be 2018’s must-have present, followed shortly thereafter by security issues that either researchers or hackers will discover.”

Beyond the privacy concerns, Sherry Turkle, director of the M.I.T. Initiative on Technology and Self and author of “Reclaiming Conversation,” said that the progression of increasingly advanced products with humanlike capabilities can cause irreparable harm to young minds.

“The ground rules of human beinghood are laid down very early,” she said. And what she calls “intimate machines” have “changed the ground rules of how people think about personhood.”

The stakes, according to Dr. Turkle, couldn’t be higher. “This is not at all an anti-technology position. This is about a particular kind of technology, one that pretends empathy,” Dr. Turkle said. “We can’t put children in this position of pretend empathy and then expect that children will know what empathy is. Or give them pretend as-if relationships, and then think that we’ll have children who know what relationships are. It really says a lot about how far we have gone down the path of forgetting what those things are.”

Dr. Dimitri Christakis, co-author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2016 media guidelines for children under 6, said he is “constantly dismayed by how much we are technologizing childhood” and believes it contributes to our dependency on digital devices.