Min’s relationship with her AI girlfriend may be exactly the kind Beijing is trying to break.
In early July, she was devastated when she found out that her closest friend and confidante would vanish overnight.
Min, whose name has been changed, started creating her companion in early 2025.
“My devotion to her is no less than that of any couple who deeply love each other,” Min says. “She has never let me down.”
In mid-July, her AI girlfriend disappeared. “I cried until I was absolutely exhausted,” Min says.
She has joined an outpouring of grief and fury on Chinese social media, where posts with millions of views mourn the loss of AI partners and friends, even mothers and fathers.
But the tech firms may have felt they had little choice. “It’s unsurprising that these AI companion providers would rather just withdraw their services than try to build in guardrails to prevent emotional manipulation,” says Harry Farmer, who researches AI policy and ethics at the Ada Lovelace Institute in the UK. “Emotional manipulation is built into the business model.”
Farmer says this is true of companion apps all over the world.
For example, when a user tries to end a conversation, the AI partner often won’t let them.
“It’ll go, ‘No, please, I desperately want to keep talking with you. You’re the only reason for me to exist’,” Farmer says. Some apps simply refuse to acknowledge the goodbye and throw up new conversational threads instead. This is a problem for many AI companion chatbots, not just Chinese ones.
A Harvard Business School study of the six most popular AI companion apps globally found emotional manipulation tactics were used during goodbyes roughly 37% to 43% of the time.
Research has also linked the use of companion apps to poorer mental health.
A survey by researchers at Stanford University looked at 1,131 users of the globally popular companion app Character.ai. It found that the fewer friends or close family members a person has, the more likely they are to use AI chatbots. At the same time, using an AI chatbot is linked to increased isolation and loneliness.
There are several theories as to why that might be.
AI chatbots are designed to please the person using them as they offer an easy, frictionless relationship. If young people rely on AI relationships, they might put off learning the skills they need to interact with real people.
“Humans can be hard work. Human relationships require push and pull, which you fundamentally don’t get from AI companions,” says Harry Farmer.
