<p>Conversational agents, such as chatbots, have increasingly found their way into many dimensions of our lives, including entertainment and education. In this exploratory study, we designed Ask Me Anything (AMA), a child-friendly, topic-specific chatbot, and investigated children’s attitudes and trust toward AI-driven conversational agents. Unlike general-purpose assistants, AMA was constrained to three child-relevant topics—astronomy, sneakers and shoes, and dinosaurs—to prompt targeted questioning from students and drive engagement. We tested AMA with 63 students, ages 6 to 14, including first-graders and middle school students (grades 6 to 8), in a public school in the Northeastern United States. Students worked in small groups, interacted with our tool for three to ten minutes, and completed a post-survey. We identified three key themes that emerged from student conversational interactions with AMA: expressing wonder, surprise, and curiosity; building trust and developing confidence; and building relationships and anthropomorphizing. Also, we observed a broad attitude of openness and comfort. Students trusted the chatbot responses in general, indicating a high level of trust in and reliance on AI as a source of information. They described AMA as “knowledgeable,” “smart,” and that they could “trust it.” To confirm their perception of reliability, some students tested the chatbot with questions to which they knew the answers. This behavior illustrated a fundamental aspect of children’s cognitive development: the process of actively evaluating the credibility of sources. This study contributes to the growing literature on child–AI interaction by revealing gaps in children’s critical engagement and highlighting the need for design that scaffolds AI literacy. It reveals the need for age-sensitive, trust-aware design and points to a broader gap in digital safety awareness among children interacting with AI.</p>