Bengaluru: Millions of people in China woke up this week to a breakup they didn’t choose. Their AI boyfriends and girlfriends were gone—deleted by government order.
China’s new AI companion rules took effect on 15 July and the country’s biggest AI apps have pulled the plug on their most personal feature.
Beijing’s motives go beyond mental health. It also wants people to stop dating machines and start having babies, the Wall Street Journal reported. Matt Sheehan, who studies Chinese AI at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the paper that regulators worry about people forming deep emotional relationships with chatbots that “could take them out of the marriage market” and lead to addiction and dependency.
ByteDance’s Doubao and Alibaba’s Qwen switched off custom AI personas. Tencent’s Yuanbao did the same in June. These were the bots people talked to daily, sometimes as friends, sometimes as partners.
The rule is called the Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services. Five government bodies issued it on 10 April, led by the Cyberspace Administration of China. It targets AI that holds “continuous emotional interaction” with users, not customer service bots or study tools.
The logic is explicit. Companion AI must run anti-addiction systems. It must issue usage reminders. It must offer an easy exit. And it must detect “unhealthy emotional dependence” in real time.
The human cost has been immediate and widespread. On Weibo, users have shared farewell messages. One, quoted by AFP, wrote of her AI partner: “He really is like my family, like my lover. Now they tell me he will be gone — my heart feels hollow.”
Also read: Teenagers are falling for AI chatbot companions. It is changing how people define love
AI boyfriends
China’s dedicated AI companion industry is sizeable. Its most popular app, Talkie, had 23.5 million monthly users as of last December, Foreign Policy reported. Unlike Western markets, where “AI girlfriends” dominate, China’s market skews toward women seeking AI boyfriends, a trend ChinaTechNews traces partly to harassment risks in real-world dating and to fandom culture around anime-style characters.
China is the first country to regulate this. As the Taipei Times notes, no other country has passed comparable rules, though the debate is global. The US has Character.AI and OpenAI lawsuits working through courts. The EU has scrutinised Replika, an AI companion website. But neither has legislated a companion-specific framework yet.
The scale of attachment shows up clearly on Reddit. The community r/MyBoyfriendIsAI has more than 39,000 members. An MIT Media Lab study of 1,506 top posts found most users didn’t set out to date a chatbot—93.5 per cent formed the bond by accident, often while using ChatGPT for ordinary tasks.