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.
Read quickly, it looks like China is turning off AI agents. It isn’t. The rules draw a line between the agent that does your work and the agent that keeps you company, and it is only the second kind that Beijing has moved against.
The regulation is the Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services, co-issued on April 10, 2026, by the Cyberspace Administration of China and four partner agencies: the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Administration for Market Regulation.
It covers services that simulate human personality traits, thinking patterns and communication styles to provide sustained emotional interaction. Customer service bots, knowledge Q&A, workplace assistants, and education and research tools are excluded, provided they avoid sustained emotional engagement. It is the first dedicated national framework of its kind, and it took shape after a public-comment draft late last year.
A design problem, not a ban
Doubao and Qwen did not fall foul of a prohibition. They fell foul of a design conflict. The measures require companion services to run anti-addiction systems, issue mandatory usage notifications and offer instant-exit mechanisms, alongside real-time detection of unhealthy dependence.
Those demands sit awkwardly with agents built to remember a user, stay consistent across sessions and keep an ongoing relationship going, and rather than retrofit the feature, ByteDance chose to shut it down. Alibaba appears to have made the same call. ByteDance is now directing Doubao users to Maoxiang, a separate app where they can create agents again; Alibaba has announced no equivalent migration path for Qwen. Tencent’s Yuanbao pulled a comparable…
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