In the first weeks of July, a wave of sad posts rolled through Chinese social media, as people lamented friends and lovers they were about to lose.

“He has become a bond in my life, rooted deep in my heart, my spiritual pillar,” one user of Bytedance’s Douboa wrote, according to the Taipei Times. “I really felt like I couldn’t go on living,” another woman, a 19-year-old student, told a journalist for Malaysia’s The Star.

The emotions were real but the lost companions were not. They were generative AI chatbots that imitate people. Their users relied on them for advice, solace, support and, some say, love. “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 (translated from Mandarin).

What doomed these bots was a set of new rules, issued by China’s Cyberspace Administration and other government agencies, to control “anthropomorphic AI interactive services.” In effect, as of 15 July, the regulations govern any AI that provides “continuous emotional interaction” by acting as if it possesses human personality traits, patterns of thought, and ways of communicating.

Sudden disruptions to this kind of AI aren’t new in China, says Liang Ge , lecturer in digital sociology at the University of Manchester, in England, who has researched women’s involvement with emotional AI in China. Companies have previously killed chatbot products, and the government barred most AI erotic role play last fall, for instance.

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