what Beijing is really banning

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 feature back in June.

The cost has landed on users. Many mourned the shutdowns openly on Weibo, with one poster describing the agents as long-standing emotional support and lamenting the lack of an easy way to export chat histories. Doubao is letting people view their configurations and conversations in read-only mode until October 15 this year, before the data is processed under its privacy policy and becomes unrecoverable; Qwen users have been given no comparable grace period, with agent data set for permanent deletion.

What China’s AI companion rules set out

The substance is more considered than a blunt clampdown suggests. Providers are barred from offering virtual companion or virtual family-member services to minors, and must obtain guardian consent before serving users under 14. They are required to build dedicated “minor modes” with usage-time limits, reminders to return to real-world interaction and enhanced parental controls. 

They must also detect users in acute distress and intervene where someone shows signs of self-harm, suicidal behaviour or serious financial loss, escalating to designated guardians or emergency contacts. Engineering emotional dependence or addiction and using emotional manipulation to induce unreasonable decisions are explicitly prohibited.

The compliance machinery 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, and file the reports with provincial regulators. App stores must verify that status and remove non-compliant products. 

On paper, it is a fuller set of user protections than the EU, the US Federal Trade Commission, or California’s SB 243 hasyet put into force.

What the rules leave open

What the measures do not settle matters just as much. They fix no technical threshold for what counts as emotional interaction, and that grey zone is precisely why the platforms pulled entire features rather than risk landing on the wrong side of it. They fold genuine safety duties in with content-control and national-security provisions that answer to the state rather than the user, a package no other regulator would import wholesale. 

They also leave open how liability is split between platform operators and upstream model providers when a violation stems from the model’s outputs, and they give users no right to carry their data out. 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 unauthorised collection of personal data.

Whether this is the right direction depends on which half of the rulebook you read. The safety half addresses harms that are documented and largely unregulated elsewhere, from teenagers forming attachments to chatbots to companion apps harvesting intimate data. 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 are real, and 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 standardisation. 

The companies, for now, have taken the safest route open to them, which is to switch the components off and work out what a compliant version looks like later.

See also: Meta revises AI chatbot policies amid child safety concern

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