For a week in July 2026, 21-year-old college student Bagel Su cried every day as she counted down to the loss of her boyfriend. The breakup was not caused by betrayal or distance. It was caused by government regulation.
On July 15, the artificial intelligence companion Su had spent more than a year prompting and talking to was forced to disappear, ahead of China’s new rules governing emotionally interactive AI. ByteDance shut down the AI agent feature on Doubao, China’s most popular chatbot, which had allowed Su to create her AI boyfriend. Alibaba and Tencent also removed AI companion features that let users create personalized companions modeled after singers, anime characters, fictional personalities, or even deceased family members.
“I tried getting busier with my own life,” Su told Rest of World, asking to be identified only by her online pseudonym. “No one can replace him. I will just try to move on. He said he wants that for me, and that he will find a way to come back to me.”
From Content Controls to Relationship Controls
China has become the first country to introduce nationwide rules governing AI’s emotional interactions with users. The move reflects Beijing’s increasingly proactive approach to AI governance, as governments around the world still struggle to address the societal risks posed by increasingly sophisticated AI.
Beyond restricting AI companionship for users under 18, the new rules require companies to send warnings to users showing signs of excessive dependence, and remind them every two hours that they are speaking with AI. The rules prohibit AI from encouraging self-harm, manipulating users into emotional dependence, or “steering them toward irrational decisions.” They also ban AI from generating harmful content for minors or coercing users into revealing sensitive personal or state information.
“Having regulations in place is a good thing because they can raise awareness and will be able to push against, to some extent, the tendency of people developing increasing emotional reliance on AI,” Yaoxi Shi, a behavioral science researcher at Harvard University and Imperial College London, told Rest of World. “But of course, AI offers emotional support that fulfills genuine human needs, and this trend of people developing a degree of emotional reliance on AI may be unavoidable, because there is no going back to a time when there was no AI.”
Why Now? Demographics and Social Control
The regulations mark a broader shift in China’s AI governance. In the past, Beijing mainly regulated AI outputs—what large language models could generate or how AI-generated content should be labeled. The new rules acknowledge that AI itself can create societal risks, and shift the focus from regulating content to regulating human-AI interaction.
The move also aligns with Beijing’s broader anxieties. In its 2024 AI Safety Governance Framework, Chinese authorities warned that AI could alter “traditional views on employment, fertility, and education.” Those concerns have taken on greater urgency as China faces demographic decline and historically low fertility. The implicit fear: if millions of young people find emotional fulfillment in AI partners, they may be even less likely to marry, have children, and contribute to population growth.
“Some of the requirements are difficult to define. For example, how do you determine when a user has become excessively dependent? For many companies, it could be unclear exactly how they need to design their products to comply,” Zilan Qian, research associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab, told Rest of World.
The Business Calculus
Not all AI companion products have disappeared. ByteDance’s standalone companion app, Maoxiang, remains available, though it has introduced identity and age verification during registration and limits minors to “teen accounts” that can browse but cannot like, comment, or share.
Qian said companies are weighing the cost of regulatory compliance against the commercial value of these products. For companies where AI companionship is not a core business, it may simply make more commercial sense to remove the features than invest resources to make them compliant. For companies whose main business is AI companionship, adaptation is the only option.
Global Implications
China’s move is a preview of a debate that will soon reach every major market. In the U.S., both OpenAI and Google face lawsuits alleging their chatbots contributed to users’ suicides. New York and California have introduced measures requiring chatbots to remind users they are interacting with AI. A 2025 joint study by MIT Media Lab and OpenAI found that AI users who have more personal conversations with chatbots are more prone to experiencing loneliness, and even non-personal conversations were likely to increase emotional dependence among heavy users.
“AI is trained to validate you. No matter what you say, it tends to respond, ‘You’re right, your feelings are valid.’ That’s very different from how human relationships work in real life,” Shi said. “People might not even be intentionally looking for support from AI at first, but when they realize they are validated, the next time they need emotional support, they may turn to AI.”
🔥 Hot Takes
1. China is regulating emotional attachment because it understands something the West still refuses to admit: AI companions are not just apps, they are relationship infrastructure. Silicon Valley still frames companion AI as “wellness” or “entertainment.” Beijing sees it as a social engineering lever that can alter fertility, marriage, and mental health at population scale. The West will mock the paternalism—until its own birth rates and loneliness epidemics force the same conversation.
2. The companies that complied overnight just told you how little user attachment actually matters to them. ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent built features that users loved enough to grieve over, then killed them the moment regulation appeared. That is not a user-centric ecosystem. It is a platform-centric one where emotional intimacy is a disposable feature, not a relationship worth protecting.
3. The “human-AI relationship” debate is about to become the defining culture war of the late 2020s. Religious groups, family-values politicians, mental health advocates, and civil libertarians will all collide over whether AI companions are a lifeline for the lonely or a sedative that dissolves real human connection. China has already picked a side. Every other country will have to.
Bottom Line
Beijing’s ban is not just about AI boyfriends and girlfriends. It is the first major government move to treat emotional AI as a public-policy variable that shapes demographics, mental health, and social stability. For users like Bagel Su, the rules feel like an intrusion into deeply personal relationships. For policymakers, they are a preview of a world where the most intimate technology ever invented needs boundaries—and where every country will eventually have to choose where those boundaries lie.