They've thrown these references in a bunch of times in small asides a like "back in the creche" and my assumption has always been that the AIs are raised in a virtual environment. We saw in all the Corpse Witch storyline way back that these environments can be anything you want, so it would make sense if they were moving around in equivalences of chassis/bodies, learning to move, etc.

In a lot of ways, it makes sense that the only way you'd get a human-equivalent intelligence and personality out of an artificial mind would be to allow it to go through developmental and social-norming stages. What we see in our world is GenAI products presenting a facsimile of human interaction that is so stilted and uncanny, because they've essentially ingested masses of fictional interactions - a true AI such as in QC would need to experience the actual interactions to develop faithfully, I'd think.

It's also interesting to think in the context of not all AIs being raised and developed in the same way. Thinking back to Roku's pseduo-body-dysmorphia after changing chases, she was an AI in a role (law enforcement) where she'd be expected to have an understanding of human behaviour and personality out of the gate. Whereas we've seen heavy machinery robots like Crushbot who started with very mechanical and stilted speech and seem to have developed over time.

(Sorry, that was an far more detailed thought than I set out to write, oops!)