At Licensing Expo in Las Vegas last month, Cobra Commander accused me of being in league with Destro.
To be fair, I started it.
Inside Hasbro’s booth, I put Sixth Wall’s technology to an early test by suggesting that one of the booths on the show floor might be a front for M.A.R.S. Industries. Cobra Commander, speaking to me through a laptop, immediately fired back, convinced that Destro had gone behind his back with some kind of scheme. His digital blood pressure spiked in seconds.
For casual observers, the exchange might have sounded like nonsense. For G.I. Joe fans, it was a direct line into the lore that lives beyond the toys, comics, animation, and games. Cobra Commander sounded like Cobra Commander. More importantly, he behaved like Cobra Commander.
That distinction sits at the center of Sixth Wall, Hasbro’s new AI studio built to bring authorized character experiences into the AI era. The studio is introducing Behavioral Licensing, a new category of IP licensing focused on how characters think, speak, and interact in dynamic experiences. Hasbro is also partnering with ElevenLabs to bring select characters to the company’s Iconic Marketplace as AI-generated character interactions spread across chat, voice, gaming, and content-creation platforms, often without the authorization of rights holders or creators.
Roberta Thomson, CEO of Sixth Wall, says Hasbro saw an opportunity to build a framework that gives partners access to official characters while protecting the brands, talent, and fans.
“Think of us as the talent agents for our AI characters,” Thomson told The Toy Book at Licensing Expo. “It’s a B2B play. We know the demand is there, and characters are everywhere, but it’s the Wild West.”
Thomson said rights holders face a few options as unauthorized AI character content grows. They can pursue enforcement of violations, enable user-generated content at the source, or establish an official channel for licensed character use. Sixth Wall is Hasbro’s answer.
“The tack we’ve taken is, what if we offered the authorized blue-check version of the characters to companies and set the business and economic model for what the future of AI IP looks like?” Thomson said. “Right now, all of our IP is trapped in static contexts — a toy on a shelf, a video game, an ebook. But when the characters can speak in real time, you have to govern their behavior in real time.”
That governance runs through CharacterOS, Sixth Wall’s proprietary system designed to preserve a character’s personality, canon, voice, and safety guardrails across interactive experiences. Each character is built using authorized source material and real voice performances. Hasbro says Sixth Wall has established a talent participation model that compensates performers and uses only authorized recordings. Talent involved in the effort thus far includes Transformers and G.I. Joe voice icons such as Frank Todaro (Cobra Commander, Starscream), Gregg Berger (Grimlock), and Frank Welker (Megatron), as well as Krystal K.C. Wilson (Clue’s Miss Scarlett), and others.
“CharacterOS … is built around a creator-first model that gives voice talent and creatives a meaningful seat at the table. It gives brands a trusted way to bring characters into new AI-enabled platforms without losing what makes them authentic,” says Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks. “And most exciting to me, it opens entirely new surfaces for play and storytelling, from making a store greeting feel magical to transforming a call waiting experience into a moment with a fan’s favorite character.”
Gray Bright, Chief Creative Officer of Sixth Wall, said the path to Sixth Wall began after ChatGPT shifted the conversation around generative AI. Bright, then working on the Hasbro Games team, began exploring how the technology could enhance existing brands. That led to Trivial Pursuit Infinite, a digital version of the classic trivia game that could generate questions in real time around topics that might never appear in a boxed edition.
The team experimented with an AI Ouija board experience last Halloween. Bright said the project logged 250,000 interactions in 72 hours, signaling that AI could “be used, playfully.” While “the spirits have departed,” according to the Ouija website, success with the “mystifying oracle” opened the door for character tests.
Bright said an unbranded fox prototype could talk back, but it lacked emotional pull. A later experiment with Peppa Pig changed the equation.
“As soon as we said to her, ‘How are you?’ she said, ‘Oh, I’m very well. Do you like jumping in muddy puddles?” Bright said. “There it is. That’s that immediate connection.”
Daily tests using other Hasbro characters quickly began alongside work on building a personality file for each, wrapped in moderation and safety systems, then applied through different experiences. Bright described the files as a “Golden Record” for each character.
One experiment, Radio Hasbro, cast characters as DJs on a 24-hour radio station. Mr. Potato Head hosted Good Morning Spudsville. Colonel Mustard created The Midnight Dossier. And Autobot leader Optimus Prime handled the Primetime Morning Roll-out. Naturally, Megatron, leader of the Decepticons, hated nearly every request.
Bright recalled asking Megatron to play Oasis’ 1995 HIT, “Wonderwall.”
“Up next for the pathetic human known as Gray is a song by Oasis titled ‘Wonderwall,’” Bright said, recounting the character’s response. “Isn’t it just like a human to wonder about a wall?”
For Bright, the moment crystallized the opportunity. The technology worked because personality shaped the interaction.
“That’s exactly how Megatron would act as a DJ,” Bright said. “The lens of their personality informs how they speak.”
At launch, a dozen Hasbro characters, including Mr. Potato Head, Optimus Prime, Megatron, Cobra Commander, and the cast of Clue, will be available to request through ElevenLabs’ Iconic Marketplace alongside famous names (and voices) like Sir Michael Caine, David Hasselhoff, Stan Lee, and Judy Garland. Sixth Wall is also accepting requests for time-bound Behavioral Licensing pilots through its website. Early use cases include interactive storytelling, conversational games, digital companions, connected physical products and robotics, AI-powered brand ambassadors, location-based entertainment, and customer engagement agents.
As the conversation about guardrails and ethics involving AI-powered products for kids continues, Sixth Wall’s initial focus is on developing experiences and enterprise use cases for fans ages 13 and up.
Thomson said the studio is focused on audio first and is not trying to compete with image- or video-generation platforms. The strength, she said, is Hasbro’s IP and brand stewardship applied to emerging tech.
Bright added that flexibility matters because the underlying AI models will continue to change. Sixth Wall currently builds on frontier models and technology partners, including ElevenLabs for text-to-speech, while maintaining a consistent core character layer.
“In five years’ time, if the model providers have changed, our characters can’t,” Bright said. “Optimus Prime still needs to be that same version of Optimus.”
For Hasbro, the bet is that the next frontier of licensing may be less about where a character appears and more about how that character acts when fans talk back.
Or, in Cobra Commander’s case, how quickly he suspects Destro.
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