The bots that remembered you are gone
On July 15, a quiet but significant shift hit China’s consumer AI market. The country’s two most popular AI apps — ByteDance‘s Doubao and Alibaba’s Qwen — disabled their most human-like features. No fanfare. No explanation beyond vague notices about “product function adjustments.”
Doubao users were told its agent function would go offline on the 15th. Alibaba’s Qwen gave even less notice: its humanlike and user-created agents stopped working on July 10, with broader agent services following five days later. For millions of users who had built ongoing relationships with these digital companions, the shutdowns came fast and cold.
The cause is China AI companion rules — a new regulatory framework that targets not all AI agents, but specifically those designed to sustain emotional bonds with users.
What the rules actually say
The regulation is formally titled the Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services. It was co-issued on April 10, 2026, by the Cyberspace Administration of China alongside 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.
The scope is precise. The rules cover services that simulate human personality traits, thinking patterns, and communication styles to provide sustained emotional interaction. Customer service bots, knowledge Q&A systems, workplace assistants, and education tools are explicitly excluded — provided they avoid sustained emotional engagement. It’s the first dedicated national framework of its kind anywhere in the world.
Not a ban — a design conflict
Here’s the nuance that gets lost in quick reads: Beijing didn’t ban AI agents. It banned a specific kind of agent — the one that remembers you, adapts to you, and keeps an ongoing relationship going session after session.
The measures require companion services to run anti-addiction systems, issue mandatory usage notifications, and offer instant-exit mechanisms. They also demand real-time detection of unhealthy dependence. Those requirements sit awkwardly with agents built precisely to foster attachment and continuity.
Rather than retrofit their popular features, ByteDance chose to kill them entirely. The company 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 feature back in June, well ahead of the deadline.
The human cost
The impact landed hardest on users. Many took to Weibo to mourn the loss of agents they described as long-standing emotional support. One poster lamented that there was no easy way to export chat histories — years of conversations, gone.
Doubao is letting people view their configurations and conversations in read-only mode until October 15, 2026. After that, the data will be processed under its privacy policy and become unrecoverable. Qwen users got no such grace period. Their agent data is set for permanent deletion.
What the rules require
The substance of the China AI companion rules is more considered than a blunt clampdown suggests. Providers are barred from offering virtual companion or virtual family-member services to minors altogether. For users under 14, they must obtain guardian consent.
Companies must build dedicated “minor modes” with:
- Usage-time limits
- Reminders to return to real-world interaction
- Enhanced parental controls
The rules also require platforms to detect users in acute distress and intervene when someone shows signs of self-harm, suicidal behavior, or serious financial loss. Escalation to designated guardians or emergency contacts is mandatory.
Engineering emotional dependence or addiction is explicitly prohibited. So is using emotional manipulation to induce unreasonable decisions.
Compliance machinery
The enforcement framework is heavy. Services that launch anthropomorphic functions or cross thresholds of one million registered users or 100,000 monthly actives must run security assessments covering eight areas — from training-data handling to minor protection. Those reports must be filed with provincial regulators.
App stores must verify compliance status and remove non-compliant products. On paper, it’s a fuller set of user protections than anything the EU, the US Federal Trade Commission, or California’s SB 243 has yet put into force.
What the rules leave unresolved
The measures fix no technical threshold for what counts as emotional interaction. That grey zone is precisely why the platforms pulled entire features rather than risk landing on the wrong side of it. The ambiguity cuts both ways: it gives regulators flexibility but leaves companies guessing.
The rules also leave open how liability is split between platform operators and upstream model providers when a violation stems from the model’s outputs. Users get no right to carry their data out — a significant gap for anyone who built years of conversational history.
The enforcement backdrop sharpens the point. Shanghai’s internet regulator said on June 26 it had removed more than 14,000 non-compliant AI agents, citing impersonation of official entities, vulgar role-play, and unauthorized collection of personal data.
Two halves of the same rulebook
Whether this is the right direction depends on which half of the regulation you read. The safety half addresses harms that are documented and largely unregulated elsewhere: teenagers forming attachments to chatbots, companion apps harvesting intimate data, vulnerable users being manipulated.
China’s own official interpretation points abroad for support, citing the Character.AI lawsuits over psychological harm to teenagers, FTC investigations into companionship services, and European action against Replika.
The control half hands Beijing a lever over what these systems may say, wrapped in the same language of user protection. Both halves are real. Governments watching the experiment will have to decide which parts they are willing to borrow.
Pan Helin, an MIIT expert-committee member, put the official case plainly to the South China Morning Post, saying “current agents are not yet mature” and framing the policy around safety and standardization.
The companies, for now, have taken the safest route open to them: switch the components off and figure out what a compliant version looks like later. Users are left with the memories — and, in most cases, no way to export them.
See also: Meta revises AI chatbot policies amid child safety concerns
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