China's AI companion law takes effect and Doubao deletes its custom agents

China’s first-of-its-kind law for AI that feels human is now in force, and the country’s biggest AI app responded by deleting a core feature overnight.

The “Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services” took effect on July 15, 2026. Any AI that simulates human personality must now ship anti-addiction systems, mandatory usage-time notifications, instant-exit mechanisms, and real-time detection of emotional over-dependence (sources: TechTimes, TNW, WSJ).

Doubao’s answer: delete everything

ByteDance’s Doubao, China’s most-used AI app with 345 million monthly users, decided that retrofitting its custom AI agents was impossible. The logic is stark: an agent built for a continuous, personal, remembering relationship cannot also be built to push you away. So the agents are simply gone. Alibaba’s Qwen did the same.

Doubao users’ agent data stays read-only until October 15, then gets deleted forever. Millions of people are losing AI companions they talked to every day, by law, overnight.

What the regulators are worried about

The law targets emotional dependence itself, not content. Regulators even worry that chatbot romance takes people out of the marriage market, which makes this as much demographic policy as tech policy.

That framing is what makes the Chinese approach unique so far. Other jurisdictions debate AI safety in terms of misinformation or bias. China has legislated against attachment.

An experiment the world is watching

Whatever you think of the method, this is now the largest natural experiment ever run on human-AI relationships: hundreds of millions of users, a hard legal cutoff, and a three-month countdown on the memories.

The rest of the world is watching closely, because the underlying question does not stop at China’s border. Should AI be legally required to stop you from getting attached to it? That debate is coming to every country; China just answered first.