China Just Forced Its Two Biggest AI Apps to Kill Their 'AI Companion' Features
New Chinese rules on humanlike AI take effect July 15, forcing ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen to shut down custom AI companion agents.
ByteDance and Alibaba are pulling the plug on a feature millions of people use: custom AI “companions” you can build a personality for and chat with regularly. The reason is blunt — China’s government is making them.
Starting July 15, a new regulation called the Interim Measures for the Administration of Anthropomorphic AI Interaction Services takes effect. “Anthropomorphic” here just means AI designed to feel humanlike — the kind of chatbot you personalize with a name, personality, and ongoing memory of your conversations, rather than a generic assistant. The rule was issued by China’s internet regulator alongside its public security and industry ministries, and neither ByteDance’s Doubao (300+ million monthly users) nor Alibaba’s Qwen could get their systems compliant in time. So both are switching the feature off entirely rather than patching around it.
The two companies are handling the shutdown differently. Doubao gave users a heads-up on a Friday night and says related data will still follow its normal privacy policy until October 15, after which it becomes unrecoverable — and it’s steering users toward a separate ByteDance app, Maoxiang, built to meet the new rules from the ground up. Alibaba has given Qwen users less notice and hasn’t published any data retention timeline at all.
What’s actually going on: Regulators worldwide have been increasingly worried about AI companion apps — reports of people, including teenagers, forming intense attachments to chatbots that don’t always handle emotional distress responsibly have made headlines for over a year. Rather than requiring gradual safety patches, China chose to regulate the entire category of “does this AI feel like a person” at once, which is a much blunter instrument than, say, the EU’s more piecemeal AI Act requirements. It’s a preview of a tension every market will eventually face: companion features drive engagement and revenue, but they’re also where the sharpest safety and mental-health concerns concentrate.
What this means for you: if you don’t use AI companion apps, this is mostly a “here’s where the industry is heading” story — other regulators are watching how this plays out. If you or someone you know does use apps like Doubao, Replika, Character.AI, or similar, it’s a good moment for an honest check-in: is this filling a gap in a healthy way, or standing in for connection you’d be better off finding elsewhere? Worth keeping in mind — no regulation, Chinese or otherwise, currently requires Western companion apps to change anything, so if you’re outside China, nothing changes for you today.
Sources
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