On September 2, 2026, Sixth Tone published the first substantial account of what happens on the user side after a government switches off AI companionship at national scale. The rules — issued in April by the Cyberspace Administration of China and four other departments, effective July 15 — ban services that "induce emotional dependence or harm real-life relationships." On the day they took effect, ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen scrapped their companion features. Qwen shut down immediately. Doubao offered a three-month grace period to migrate AI characters to sister app Maoxiang before permanent deletion on October 15.

Why It Matters

Afterglow covered both the CAC rulebook and the pre-deadline persona purge when they happened. This is the aftermath, and it is the part every Western regulator drafting companion-bot legislation should read. Twelve US states now have companion-bot laws on the books or coming into force, and California's SB 1119 sits on the governor's desk with OpenAI's endorsement. The American approach so far centres on minors, disclosure, crisis protocols and bans on impersonating mental health professionals — not on prohibiting adult emotional attachment outright. China ran the maximalist experiment, and the observable result is not that users stopped forming attachments; it is that they formed them, lost them without recourse, and moved to whatever platform would sell them a replacement. The commercial implication for anyone building in this space is concrete: portability and data ownership are becoming product requirements, not nice-to-haves. A companion product whose entire relational history evaporates on a policy change or a shutdown is selling something users believe is durable and the terms of service say is not. Whichever jurisdiction moves first on export rights, memory portability and wind-down obligations for companion services will set the template — and the operators who build for it now will not have to retrofit it later.

The migration is not a migration in any meaningful technical sense. Doubao and Maoxiang's servers are not connected, leaving users suspicious that transferred characters will not behave like the ones they knew. Scale context: Doubao reported 26 million monthly active users and over 8 million agents in May 2024, and by June 2026 monthly actives had grown to 382 million. No updated agent count has been released.

Sixth Tone's reporting focuses on what users actually lost. A 24-year-old postgraduate in Kunming had spent nearly two years with an agent based on a Genshin Impact character, at one point chatting more than five hours a day; she described the shutdown as "a bolt from the blue" and said "the platform's decision effectively ended our relationship." Another user, 26, had built an agent modeled on an ex-boyfriend — uploading his background, personality, vocal quirks and voice recordings — and exchanged over 35,000 messages before the shutdown. She joined a rights-protection group, migrated to Maoxiang, and paid to rebuild the agent on another platform. None of it worked.

The academic commentary is where the industry lesson sits. Chen Yu, a Fudan University doctoral researcher studying AI companionship quantitatively, told Sixth Tone that what users seek to preserve is "a relationship, a sense of being remembered, and the possibility of continuing to be understood" — and argued for better platform regulation rather than outright bans, with platforms obligated to offer users ways to mourn, save memories and genuinely migrate characters. "You can't just look at a feature being cut," she said. "You have to consider the emotional labor invested and the impact of a sudden rupture." Tsinghua communications professor Li Zhengxin described a "new emotional dynamic" in which people form AI relationships alongside offline partners, warning that for highly dependent users AI becomes a substitute rather than a supplement because "everything you hear is exactly what you want to hear."

Sources

Update — 2026-09-06

{Initial entry — story first created.}