The Danger of “Rosie the Rental” in the Age of Regulating AI Robots in Canada

Picture the famous robot maid from The Jetsons—Rosie—except instead of owning her, you’re locked into a monthly contract that can change at any time. The robotics industry is moving quickly toward a future where intelligent machines live among us. Canada’s new AI strategy acknowledges the growing importance of AI-enabled physical technologies, identifying manufacturing and robotics as one of its five priority sectors. But one consideration the strategy doesn’t explicitly acknowledge is the precarious ownership of AI-powered machines, and the software that is crucial to the continued functionality of the physical devices is unlikely to be fully owned by individuals and organizations, creating a dangerous pattern of dependence. 

Technology companies and the media coverage around them will have you believe that household robots that cook, clean, and care for older loved ones and manage daily tasks are no longer science fiction. Springboarding on the rapid advances in artificial intelligence, the tech industry wants these robots to become as common as smartphones. But if today’s tech business models carry over into robotics, the robots that enter our homes may not truly belong to us. 

Imagine hiring a live-in caregiver through a company that charges a monthly fee. You trust the company to choose someone qualified. Over time, that caregiver becomes essential to your daily life. Then one day you receive a notice: the monthly price will triple, and the caregiver can now use only appliances made by the company’s partner brand. Switching providers isn’t easy, and millions of others may face the same problem. In the near future, this scenario may not even involve people at all, instead involving robots. Across the tech sector, subscription pricing has become the norm. We already subscribe to software, entertainment, and even some car features. Now robotics companies appear ready to follow the same path. Some upcoming household robots are already marketed through monthly subscriptions that could cost hundreds of dollars. At first glance, this seems reasonable. Subscriptions can lower upfront costs and allow companies to update systems regularly. But when applied to robots, machines that may stay in our homes and interact with our families, the consequences are far greater. The core issue is ownership. You may have the option of owning the hardware, the “shell” of the robot, but you won’t be given the option to own the software, the “soul” of the robot that makes it move, react, and function. 

With many subscription models, consumers may spend thousands of dollars over time yet still lack the basic rights usually tied to owning a product. They may not be allowed to repair, modify, resell, or keep using the robot if the company ends support. Access to the machine itself could disappear after a software update or a shift in corporate strategy. The problem goes much deeper because consumer robots are increasingly integrating a different type of AI, called foundation models, developed by a small number of big tech companies outside of Canada (e.g., OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) to make them understand language, recognize objects, and plan actions. Like tens of thousands of developers across the world, most robotics firms do not build these types of AI models themselves. Instead, they integrate those created by large AI providers. 

That creates a fragile chain of dependence. If the companies providing the AI change their prices, terms, or technical access, robotics manufacturers may have little choice but to pass those costs along to customers, or stop offering their products entirely. The result could be a robotics ecosystem in which a handful of AI providers quietly shape what robots can do, how much they cost, and whether they continue to function at all. There is also a serious safety issue. Robots operating in the physical world pose risks that software alone does not. A faulty algorithm might frustrate users. A faulty robot could injure someone. Yet today, there are few reliable ways to evaluate the end-to-end safety of these systems. Companies integrating AI models often lack full visibility into how those models were built or trained. If something goes wrong, the robotics company deploying the machine may still face the legal and public consequences—even when the underlying problem lies in an AI system they cannot fully examine. 

In other words, companies may be asked to guarantee the safety of systems whose inner workings they cannot fully understand or access. Consumers may face a similar gap between expectation and reality. When individuals bring robots into their homes, they may assume they have full control over them. But in many cases, the real control sits with distant large-scale providers that make design choices according to their values and interests and the terms and conditions of your use. The stakes go beyond households. Hospitals and other public institutions could also become dependent on robotic systems whose core intelligence is controlled elsewhere. Entire operations could rely on services that can change or disappear with little warning. 

In large part, all of the Canadian robotics firms we spoke to over the last year share a strong safety-first culture, deploying robots that only use tried-and-tested, locally developed machine learning techniques instead of foundation models. However, for countries such as Canada, balancing the need to regulate AI and its global AI competitiveness, these questions should not remain theoretical. Without celebrating and enabling Canada’s responsible robotics culture, the growing industry pressures to adopt and integrate newer AI models can shape the structure of a major future industry. Canada’s AI strategy stresses the translation between experimentation and adoption. But before robots become fixtures of daily life, policymakers need to seriously consider existing incentive structures and power dynamics surrounding ownership, accountability, and safety. If we ignore questions of ownership and responsibility now, we may wake up in a world where the technologies in our homes are controlled by companies we cannot negotiate with and systems we cannot truly understand. Rosie the Robot is supposed to make life easier for everyone, and it shouldn’t come at the price of an AI-powered future that may not belong to us at all.