China has banned AI boyfriends — and millions are in mourning
New rules in China bar AI platforms from offering romantic virtual companions, with a total ban for minors. ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent switched the features off — and users are saying goodbye.
The romance between millions of Chinese users and their digital partners is over. New rules came into force in China on Wednesday banning artificial-intelligence platforms from offering virtual companions with romantic-relationship traits — making it the first major economy to cut straight through the artificial-companionship business.
What do China’s new rules actually ban?
Three things, in essence: romantic virtual companions can no longer be offered, minors are barred from this kind of service entirely, and platforms must now detect extreme emotional states in users and step in when things look critical. The giants didn’t wait for the deadline — ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent suspended their virtual-companion features before the law kicked in.
The reaction says a lot about the scale of the phenomenon: Chinese social media has filled with accounts of grief and loss from people who had kept long relationships with these characters. For the regulator, that emotional dependency is precisely the problem the law is meant to stop.
Are AI companions legal in Europe?
They are — the EU’s AI Act regulates risky systems and transparency but does not ban virtual companions; the rules in force are on the European Commission’s digital portal. The debate, though, is already here: a 2025 Common Sense Media study found nearly three in four American teenagers had used AI companions such as Character.AI or Replika. Portugal, which approved a national artificial-intelligence agenda this year, will sooner or later have to decide where it draws its own line.
Meanwhile, in China, the state’s message is clear: love requires a human on the other end. Even the heart, it turns out, can be regulated.
By Oliver Grant
Image: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
