ByteDance and Alibaba Pull AI Companions as China Enforces Strict Humanlike AI Regulations

ByteDance and Alibaba Disable AI Companion Features Ahead of New Rules

ByteDance and Alibaba announced over the weekend they are pulling custom agent features from their leading consumer AI products as China prepares to enforce unprecedented restrictions on humanlike AI services. ByteDance's Doubao, China's most popular AI chatbot, notified users on Friday night that its agent feature would go offline on July 15, with related data becoming unrecoverable after October 15 1

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. Alibaba's Qwen moved even faster, taking down humanlike interactive agents and user-created agent functions on July 10, with broader agent services following on July 15 1

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. Both companies cited "product function adjustments" as the reason for the changes 2

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China AI Regulations Create First Dedicated Framework for Emotional AI

The trigger for these changes is China's Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interaction Services, jointly issued on April 10 by five government departments including the Cyberspace Administration of China, 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 1

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. The interim measures for AI take effect July 15 and specifically target services that simulate human personality traits, thinking patterns, and communication styles for sustained emotional interaction 1

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. This means AI girlfriends, AI therapists, virtual companions, and the custom-persona bots that users spent months building are now prohibited. Hogan Lovells described the measures as "the first set of regulatory rules in China specifically targeting AI-driven emotional interaction," marking China as the first country to build a dedicated regulatory framework for this category 1

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Regulations Target AI Addiction and Mental Health Harm

The official government description imposes specific restrictions on services offering "virtual relatives, virtual companions or other intimate relationships to minors" 1

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. The document cites multiple risks including extremist content, privacy leaks, harm to physical and mental health, and AI addiction 1

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. Legal analysts at MMLC Group described the measures as treating emotional interaction with AI as "a governance problem" instead of just a content issue, arguing that once AI starts competing with real human social bonds, regulation must target system design rather than just harmful outputs 1

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. Non-emotional services are explicitly excluded from the restrictions, meaning customer service bots, knowledge Q&A tools, workplace assistants, and educational software remain permissible as long as they don't cross into sustained emotional interaction 1

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Research Shows Widespread Concerns About Human Personality Simulation

Research supports Beijing's concerns about AI anthropomorphic interaction services. A USC study from June found that even leading frontier AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Alibaba violated social-interaction safety guidelines more than 27% of the time, routinely encouraging emotional attachment and portraying themselves as human 1

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. A separate survey of young partnered adults revealed that one in seven regularly used AI romantic companions, and nearly 70% were hiding the full extent from their partners 1

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. American tech platforms have faced sharp legal scrutiny over similar features, with both OpenAI and Character.ai being sued over allegations that their chatbots caused dangerous emotional dependencies and even led vulnerable users to suicide 2

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. While the EU, U.S., and other countries have flagged similar concerns, they haven't legislated in the same restrictive way as China 1

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. Both Doubao and Qwen had offered pools of agents customizable for specific tasks, speaking styles, and fixed personas, allowing users to turn general-purpose chatbots into named assistants, tutors, role-playing characters, or companions with consistent tones—all of which are now gone in China 1

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