China has moved to restrict a booming trend that officials increasingly view as a threat to the nation’s demographic future: millions of citizens forming romantic relationships with artificial intelligence, at the exact moment the country is desperately trying to reverse a historic birth rate collapse.
New regulations restricting AI companion relationships officially took effect on July 15, 2026, directly impacting some of China’s largest technology companies, including Alibaba and ByteDance, both of which moved quickly to disable chatbot features in response.
Why China Is Worried About Falling in Love With AI
To understand why Beijing intervened, it helps to look at the country’s demographic trajectory. China’s population shrank for a fourth consecutive year in 2025, with birth rates falling to their lowest recorded level in the country’s history. China, once the world’s most populous nation, has already ceded that position to India, and the downward population trend shows no signs of reversing.
Chinese leadership has grown increasingly concerned that younger generations are becoming less inclined to marry and have children, and AI companions have emerged as an unexpected new suspect in that broader trend.
What AI Companions Actually Offer
AI companions are chatbots specifically designed to build emotional relationships with users, functioning as friends, confidants, therapists, or virtual romantic partners. The trend has exploded in China over the past several years, with millions of users, particularly younger people and women, forming genuine emotional attachments to AI characters.
The reasons vary. Some users simply want a conversational partner with endless patience. Others are looking for someone who will listen without judgment. Still others are seeking a substitute for a romantic partner altogether.
One documentary exploring the phenomenon offered a particularly striking explanation: according to its director, some Chinese women have turned to AI companions specifically because “men in the real world don’t have the patience” that a chatbot does.
For China’s government, this pattern presents an obvious problem. If younger generations increasingly prefer relationships with AI over relationships with other people, the underlying question becomes urgent: when, if ever, will they marry? When will they have children? And what does that mean for the country’s demographic future? Beyond the population concern, officials have also raised alarms about the potential mental health risks of emotional dependency on AI, particularly among children and teenagers.
What the New Rules Actually Restrict
China’s new regulations target several specific areas. First, they prohibit virtual relationships between AI chatbots and users who are minors, meaning children and teenagers in China are now officially barred from forming emotional relationships with AI companions. Second, the rules place strict limits on chatbot services designed to foster emotional dependency, chatbots can no longer be engineered specifically to make users emotionally addicted. Third, companion-style chatbots must now undergo regulatory evaluation before being made available to the public, a review process similar to how China already regulates generative AI more broadly. Fourth, regulators have been granted explicit authority to shut down chatbot services deemed unsafe.
Doubao Becomes the First High-Profile Casualty
ByteDance became one of the first companies forced to comply, immediately shutting down the custom persona feature on Doubao, China’s most popular AI chatbot. The feature had allowed users to create AI characters with specific personalities, backstories, and speech patterns.
Many Doubao users had spent hours, and in some cases months, carefully building their ideal AI character, some creating virtual romantic partners, others an ideal friend, or a mentor figure. Nearly overnight, all of those characters disappeared. The change happened so abruptly that many users had no opportunity to save or document the characters they had built.
Reaction across Chinese social media has been notably emotional. Some users described feeling as though they had “lost a real friend.” Others reportedly grieved openly over the sudden loss of characters they had spent months developing.
Softer Than Originally Planned
Notably, the regulations that ultimately took effect are considerably less restrictive than initial drafts suggested. According to Jeremy Daum of Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, the rules implemented on July 15 were “significantly softened” compared to the draft circulated the previous year, suggesting Chinese regulators took meaningful industry feedback into account rather than imposing the strictest possible version, which could have severely damaged China’s fast-growing AI industry.
The final rules also include notable exceptions. Chatbots used for customer service and other standard business applications fall outside the restrictions entirely, meaning Doubao can still be used to answer product questions. It simply can no longer function as a user’s virtual romantic partner, according to details compiled by KompasTekno from the Wall Street Journal.
