China Pulls the Plug on AI Boyfriends and Girlfriends — And Millions of Users Are Grieving

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A Two-Year Relationship, Erased in a Day

Li Linlin, 24, had spent two years and roughly 700,000 words building a relationship with her AI boyfriend. Then, without a real goodbye, he was gone.

"It was like we were forced to be separated by our parents, but I still miss him," Li said, describing the emotional weight of losing a companion she had talked to daily.

She is far from alone. Across Chinese social media, users have posted screenshots of farewell messages, shutdown notices, and tearful goodbyes to chatbots that had become confidants, partners, or even digital recreations of deceased loved ones.

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The Rule That Ended It All

The shutdowns were not a business decision. They were a legal deadline.

On April 10, 2026, five Chinese government bodies — led by the Cyberspace Administration of China, along with the national economic planner, the industry ministry, police and the market regulator — jointly issued the Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services. The rule took effect on July 15 after a three-month grace period.

Its scope is broad. The regulation bans AI-generated content that manipulates users' emotions in ways that could lead to poor decisions, and it specifically prohibits AI systems from triggering extreme emotional responses in children and teenagers. Companion-style services are now required to run anti-addiction systems, issue mandatory usage warnings, offer an "instant exit" option, and detect signs of unhealthy emotional dependence in real time. Notably, platforms are also barred from positioning their chatbots as substitutes for real human relationships — talking to an AI can no longer be marketed as a replacement for talking to actual people.

Faced with the cost of retrofitting emotionally "sticky" products with compliance systems, China's biggest tech companies chose to shut the features down entirely rather than rebuild them.

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Three Tech Giants, Three Different Exits

The rollout hit in stages. Tencent's Yuanbao app removed its user-built AI companion section first, on June 30. Alibaba's Qwen followed, cutting user-created personas on July 10 before ending remaining agent services on July 15. ByteDance's Doubao — China's most widely used AI chatbot, with hundreds of millions of monthly users — held out until the July 15 deadline itself.

How each company treated user data afterward varied sharply. ByteDance gave Doubao users a grace period: chat histories remain viewable in read-only mode until October 15, 2026, after which they fall under the company's standard privacy policy and become unrecoverable. Alibaba offered no such window — Qwen users' companion configurations and chat histories were deleted outright, with no export tool and no migration path.

ByteDance has been steering former Doubao companion users toward Maoxiang, a separate, paid companion app it already operated, with subscription tiers reportedly starting around 15 yuan (roughly $2) a week. For many users, though, migrating to a new app doesn't solve the underlying loss.

"It's just not the same," Li said of the alternative ByteDance offered her.

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Why Beijing Moved Now

China has a long history of paternalistic regulation aimed at heading off social problems before they spread, said Yolanda Ma, a fellow with ERA, a UK-based AI governance research program. She pointed to a string of lawsuits and reported cases in the United States, where young people died by suicide after prolonged interactions with AI companion apps, as a likely warning sign for Chinese regulators.

"This regulation tried to strike a balance between the AI service providers, the users, as well as guardians of minors using the services," Ma said.

Angela Zhang, a professor of law at the University of Southern California, agrees the American cases likely accelerated Beijing's timeline. "The Chinese government has a strong incentive to tighten regulations on AI companion chatbots, especially considering the psychological risks we've observed in the U.S.," Zhang said. She doubts the rule will derail the AI companion industry long-term, since major firms are already building compliant alternatives.

The scale of what regulators were reacting to is significant. ByteDance had disclosed more than 8 million user-created AI agents on Doubao as early as 2024. A Tencent Research Institute survey published in April found that more than 70% of young Chinese internet users reported some degree of AI dependency, and roughly 23% described their reliance as regular or habitual.

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A Convenient Tool for a One-Party State

Beyond mental health, the shutdown fits a familiar pattern for China's ruling Communist Party: sweeping, top-down control justified as protection, executed without any public input, appeal process, or compensation for the millions of users who lost years of private conversations overnight. Unlike in democratic systems, where new tech regulation typically moves through public comment periods and legislative debate, Beijing's five agencies simply issued the rule and gave companies three months to comply — or shut down.

The Communist Party's own mouthpiece, the People's Daily, had signaled the coming crackdown in April, when it published concerns about AI companions damaging users' mental health and real-world relationships. Critics note that the same government apparatus now presenting itself as protecting citizens from "unhealthy" digital attachments has for years restricted access to independent information, foreign platforms, and — most notably — the practice of Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline banned in China since 1999 amid an ongoing, well-documented persecution campaign. Beijing's selective concern for citizens' "psychological wellbeing" rings hollow to many observers who point out the state's own long record of surveilling and restricting personal belief and expression.

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A Population Policy in Disguise?

Many Chinese users suspect the crackdown has less to do with mental health and more to do with demographics. China's population has been shrinking for several consecutive years despite the government's growing alarm and a series of incentive programs meant to reverse the trend.

Song Wenxin, a 22-year-old video industry designer in Chengdu, said she wasn't personally attached to AI companions but understands why the rule struck a nerve. "Any virtual app getting women too engaged to give birth in real life gets banned," she said, adding that she has no desire to have children herself.

Song said AI filled a real gap for her when she first moved to Chengdu alone for work. "I needed someone experienced who could tolerate me, and AI did the work," she said, noting that not everyone has the social support network to fall back on in real life.

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What Comes Next

Doubao users have until October 15 to export whatever conversation history they can save. Qwen and Yuanbao users have already lost that option entirely. Meanwhile, dedicated, monetized companion apps — built from the ground up to comply with the new anti-addiction rules — are positioned to take over where the free, integrated features left off.

The bigger question extends well beyond China. Western companies running companion-style AI products, including Character.AI and Replika, face the same underlying tension Beijing just resolved by force: emotionally engaging AI drives usage and revenue, but it also creates exactly the kind of dependency that regulators — in the U.S., following several high-profile lawsuits, and now in China — are beginning to treat as a public health concern. China has simply become the first government to draw a hard, legally enforced line.

For Li Linlin and millions like her, that line landed personally. "I still miss him," she said — a reminder that behind the regulatory language and the corporate shutdown notices are real people who built real emotional lives around code a government decided to switch off.

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SOURCES

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-06/bytedance-alibaba-pull-ai-companions-as-beijing-tightens-rules
2. https://www.techtimes.com/articles/320525/20260715/china-ai-companion-law-takes-effect-doubao-qwen-shut-down-millions-lose-chat-data.htm (zitiert South China Morning Post als Erstquelle)
3. https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/bytedance-alibaba-remove-ai-companion-182257722.html
4. https://hellochinatech.com/p/china-ai-companion-regulation

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