China’s AI companion rules: what Beijing is really going after

An AI companion sounds dystopian, but it has become a common thread in the wider conversation about the perils of generative AI. What it refers to is essentially a conversational agent built to sustain an ongoing, personal relationship with a user, with the memory and steady persona that keep it consistent from one session to the next.

Emotional attachment often follows from that design, and it is increasingly the selling point. Much of the use is casual roleplay or simply wanting something that remembers you, and at the edges, the category shades into ordinary assistants. But as more people in China came to treat these bots as an emotional companion of sorts, Beijing has now decided the practice needs rules.

China’s AI companion rules take effect on July 15, and in the days before the deadline, the country’s two most-used consumer AI apps quietly switched off the features at their heart. ByteDance’s Doubao told users its agent function would go offline on July 15, citing “product function adjustments,” while Alibaba’s Qwen said its humanlike and user-created agents would stop working on July 10 and its wider agent services five days later.