China has banned AI-powered virtual companions for minors and imposed strict limits on all platforms offering emotional chatbots. The new regulations, effective this week, are forcing millions of users to part with their digital partners. According to ABC News, authorities in Beijing ordered ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent to shut down personalized companion features, with immediate impact on a devoted user base.
The ban targets minors but affects all users
The rules go beyond an age restriction. Platforms must prevent excessive use, cannot develop chatbots that encourage emotional dependence, and must intervene when users show signs of psychological distress. The stated goal is to protect real-world relationships, threatened by the rising popularity of virtual partners. ByteDance, which hosted over 8 million AI agents in 2024, has already shut down companion services, followed by Alibaba and Tencent. None of the companies specified how many users were cut off, but the numbers suggest a massive scale.
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Stories of emotional dependency and emptiness
User reactions have been marked by bewilderment. A 34-year-old man interviewed by ABC News reported exchanging hundreds of thousands of messages over two years with a companion named Doudou, crediting it with helping his studies, daily life, and emotional regulation. He never got to send a final message before the service went dark. "Now I feel my heart is empty," he said. Chinese social media is flooded with similar complaints, including from a user who had built a bot using the voice of a deceased relative.
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Rationale between demographics and social control
According to Matt Sheehan, an AI policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, regulators fear that companion chatbots carry addiction risks and broader negative social effects. Sheehan ties the move to China's demographic problem: national data shows the population shrank by 3.39 million in 2025, the fourth consecutive annual decline. Beijing does not want a generation of young people leaving the marriage market for online relationships, a long-tail consequence of the one-child policy that the government is now scrambling to reverse. Sheehan expects companies to comply without pushback, given regulators' leverage. However, enforcement remains weak: a 17-year-old user told ABC she kept her AI boyfriend by registering with an adult sibling's ID, a common loophole in age verification systems.
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These restrictions fit into a broader pattern of AI control in China, as previously covered in China’s new AI leap. While the country advances in AI development, the regulation of virtual companions shows the flip side: a willingness to curb unwanted social effects. It remains to be seen whether these measures will rebalance human relationships or simply create new forms of evasion.
For further analysis on global AI regulation, see the report on International Cyber Digest.
