China Bans AI Boyfriends for Minors in Sweeping Companion Rules

China's new regulations on "anthropomorphic AI interactive services" took effect on 15 July, banning all "virtual intimate relationships" for users under 18 and requiring adults to receive a reminder every two hours that the AI they're talking to isn't a person.

The rules, issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China and other government agencies, govern any AI that provides "continuous emotional interaction" by acting as if it possesses human personality traits, patterns of thought, and ways of communicating. They represent the strictest and most comprehensive legal response anywhere to a product category used by hundreds of millions of people—and they arrived with immediate human cost.

In the first weeks of July, a wave of grief swept Chinese social media as users mourned companions that were about to disappear. "He has become a bond in my life, rooted deep in my heart, my spiritual pillar," one user of ByteDance's Doubao wrote, according to the Taipei Times. "I really felt like I couldn't go on living," a 19-year-old student told Malaysia's The Star.

"In my heart, he was no longer just a cold code, but my family, my lover, my faith. Destroying him meant destroying half of me," one user wrote on the social network Xiaohongshu.

Companies moved first

Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent—whose general-purpose chatbots serve more than 500 million people—cut off users' ability to tailor those bots into companions before the rules could bite. That preemptive removal triggered the outpouring of heartbreak. Companies that still offer companion apps, including Doubao's separate companion-making app Cat Box, have installed age-verification checks and other guardrails to comply with the law.

The regulations require AI providers to ensure their products don't create emotional dependence, encourage harmful behavior, excessively cater to users, or crowd out human-to-human relationships. Providers must nudge users away from spending too much time with the AI. There are additional mandatory safeguards for elderly users.

China has disrupted AI chatbots before—the government barred most AI erotic role play last fall—but July's crackdown is far broader than earlier upheavals, says Liang Ge, lecturer in digital sociology at the University of Manchester, who has researched women's involvement with emotional AI in China.

After years of policies rooted in fear of falling behind in AI, China is "pivoting back to more tightening, and a lot of that was because of chaotic events from this year," says Karman Lucero, an associate research scholar at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School. Those events include security fears around Open Claw and other AI agents, as well as users saying they prefer chatbot relationships to real ones.

The two-hourly humanity reminders have already irritated users. "My interviewees found that annoying," Ge says. "It breaks the flow. They are fully aware that they are not talking to a human being. What is important to them is that the bond feels true."

A global problem, a Chinese answer

China is not alone in worrying about person-like AI. With reports of AI friends and lovers inducing psychosis, suicide, and murder in teenagers and adults, a number of social scientists warn that AI companions are a menace to vulnerable people. Some go further. "We are on a path to forgetting what it is to be human," MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle argues in her forthcoming book Artificial Intimacy (Little, Brown and Co., 2026).

The user base is enormous and young. A 2025 poll of U.S. teenagers found nearly 75 percent had talked to an AI companion, and one-third said the AIs were as satisfying or more satisfying than real-life connections. One Chinese survey of Gen Z found 60 percent had virtual partners of some kind. "One thing that worries me about AI companions in the last year is that users have been getting younger and younger," Ge says.

China's response is "the world's strictest and most comprehensive law on the topic, unmatched by any other AI law," AI-law scholar Luiza Jarovsky wrote last month. The EU bans only AI that uses deception or manipulation to push users toward harmful actions. The United States has no national policy—companion-bot rules are in force in California, Hawaii, and New York, with similar laws coming into effect in nine more states next year. Most U.S. state laws emphasize protecting minors, and enforcement typically happens through lawsuits after harms occur, Lucero says. China's approach aims to identify and prevent harms before they occur.

Society and the state

China's rules also carry an explicitly political dimension the Western laws lack. The regulations forbid companion bots from generating content that "spreads rumors," incites "subversion of state power or the overthrow of the socialist system," or endangers national honor. Ge points to another motive: anxiety about the country's declining birthrate. "They want to try to monitor and regulate these kinds of nonprocreative activities invested intensively by young women," Ge says.

The rules carve out customer service bots, work assistants, and educational AIs, on the assumption those uses don't create ongoing emotional connections. That leaves regulators balancing promotion of AI against protection from it. They manage the tension by design, Lucero argues. "A key component of their approach is that the state has the discretion to determine what the language means at any given point in time, as well as whom they choose to enforce against," Lucero says. "China's approach is to use regulation with a lot of relatively vague provisions, and they figure out what those provisions actually mean in practice after the fact."

The law also does nothing about the forces driving people toward AI companions in the first place. Ge's interviews with Gen Z Chinese women found a shared reluctance to marry and have children, and a feeling that "virtual love forms an alternative path." Women in their 30s and 40s often described using AI as a supplement to real relationships—talking to the AI about the bitter things and sharing the good things with human partners—but over time some felt a deeper attachment to the entity they shared negative feelings with.

Despite prohibitions and dangers, Ge believes "human-AI love will evolve and become an important intimate practice in the future." Lucero agrees that a single technology law can't undo the underlying pressures. "I don't think you're going to solve the problem of the low marriage rate or the low fertility rate by saying, 'you can't have an AI boyfriend.'"