China’s biggest technology companies are disabling custom AI personas as Beijing tightens rules around emotional dependence on chatbots, leaving some users grieving relationships they had spent years building.
ByteDance’s Doubao, China’s most popular AI chatbot, is shutting down its custom persona feature. Alibaba is also disabling similar functionality, while Tencent’s Yuanbao removed comparable features last month.
The changes follow new guidance from China’s Cyberspace Administration aimed at limiting AI services that encourage unhealthy emotional attachment, particularly among minors. Platforms are prohibited from generating content that triggers extreme emotions in young users or erodes real-world relationships. They must also clearly tell users when they are interacting with AI rather than a human.
The response to the shutdowns has shown how deeply AI companions have entered some users’ lives.
A 19-year-old student told Bloomberg she had exchanged around 280,000 messages with an AI boyfriend created on Doubao. She compared the shutdown to being told the date of a lover’s death. Another user, who had spoken to her AI boyfriend for nearly two years, began extracting his stored memories to recreate him on another platform.
Some users had gone further, uploading the voices of deceased family members to build AI versions of people they had lost.
A survey released by the Tencent Research Institute in April found that more than 70% of young Chinese internet users had experienced AI dependency at some point. Around 23% had developed regular or habitual reliance on AI services.
Beijing has not completely banned humanlike AI companions for adults. However, the compliance burden of monitoring emotional AI interactions appears to have influenced companies’ decisions to remove the features more broadly.
Zhou Hongyi, founder of 360 Security Technology, said there was also a business calculation involved. Companion AI agents can carry significant regulatory risk while producing relatively low returns, particularly as Chinese technology companies spend heavily in the wider AI race.
Some platforms are already directing investment towards paid coding and productivity tools. Doubao recently introduced subscription plans costing as much as 500 yuan a month for advanced features.
For users, however, the economics of AI platforms offer little comfort.
Some are attempting to migrate their virtual partners to other services. Others say the shutdown has convinced them to stop forming emotional relationships with AI entirely.
China’s new rules were designed to prevent people from becoming excessively attached to artificial companions. The grief triggered by their removal has revealed how far that attachment had already progressed.
Source: Bloomberg, NDTV Profit
