China Orders ByteDance and Alibaba to Shut Down Personalized AI Companions

As of July 15, Chinese tech giants ByteDance and Alibaba are required to disable personalized, human-like AI agent features in their most popular chatbots, Doubao and Qwen. The reason is a new law, the first in the world to explicitly regulate AI services that mimic human personality and build long-term emotional bonds with users.

The new rules, formally titled the Interim Measures for the Administration of Artificial Intelligence Anthropomorphic Interaction Services, prohibit AI services that "simulate human personality traits, thinking patterns, and communication styles to provide sustained emotional interaction." The law was jointly prepared by 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.

What exactly is changing

In practice, this involves features that let users create their own personalized AI agent, giving it a name, personality, and conversational style, then build a relationship with it lasting weeks or months, with memory of past conversations and a consistent personality across sessions. It's this mechanism of continuous emotional bonding, not chatbots as such, that worries Chinese regulators.

Alibaba disabled the custom agent feature in Qwen on July 10, five days ahead of the deadline. ByteDance took a similar path with Doubao, but chose to fully shut the feature down only on the day the law took effect, July 15. In their statements, both companies stuck to terse language about "adjusting product features," without referring directly to the new law.

What happens to user data

The scale of the change affects hundreds of millions of monthly active users who relied on these features, some of them holding daily conversations with their personalized agents for months at a time. ByteDance has given Doubao users a window until October 15 to export their conversation history and agent data. Alibaba has announced no migration or export path for Qwen, meaning users effectively lose access to their accumulated interactions.

The rules explicitly list the risks they aim to guard against: the spread of extremist ideologies through a trusted, personalized bot, leaks of private data disclosed in intimate conversations, harm to users' mental health, and dependency on relationships with AI. The regulation does not cover customer service bots, Q&A assistants, or educational and scientific tools, as long as they don't offer extended emotional interaction.

China gets ahead of the West

This is the world's first law to directly and comprehensively regulate the AI companion category, meaning emotional-companionship apps built on large language models. In the European Union, the AI Act classifies certain systems that manipulate user behavior as prohibited practices, but it doesn't contain a separate, dedicated category for human-like AI companions with long-term memory, and implementation deadlines for high-risk systems in Europe were recently pushed back under the Omnibus VII package.

In the United States, the AI companion issue remains largely unregulated at the federal level, despite a growing number of reports about users, including teenagers, developing deep emotional dependency on chatbots. China's rules illustrate an alternative model, one where the state preemptively restricts an entire product category instead of waiting for specific incidents and reacting after the fact.

For Poland's tech market, the regulation matters mainly as a precedent and a reference point in Europe's AI Act debate. Polish companies building chatbots or assistants generally don't offer features analogous to China's AI companions at this scale, but the growing popularity of AI emotional-companionship apps, available globally including to Polish users, means the question of regulating this category will sooner or later reach Brussels too.

Sources: South China Morning Post (scmp.com), Tech Times (techtimes.com), Global Times (globaltimes.cn)