In brief
- ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen are disabling humanlike agent features ahead of Beijing's Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interaction Services, effective July 15.
- China's first regulation specifically targeting emotional AI bans services that simulate human personality and "sustained emotional interaction," with especially strict limits on virtual companions for minors.
- Research backs Beijing's concern: Even the best frontier AI models routinely encourage harmful emotional attachment, and one in seven young adults in relationships now uses an AI romantic companion.
While American politicians tackle the impact of AI chatbots on the mental health of users with restrictions focusing on transparency and safeguards, Beijing appears poised to shut down AI personalities altogether.
ByteDance and Alibaba both announced over the weekend they are disabling custom agent features in their biggest consumer AI products, citing "product function adjustments" ahead of new rules that govern such products taking effect.
ByteDance's Doubao notified users in a Friday night notice that its agent feature would go offline on July 15. After October 15, related data would be handled under the company's privacy policy and become unrecoverable. Per South China Morning Post, Alibaba's Qwen moved faster: "humanlike interactive agents and user-created agent functions" come down July 10, with broader agent services following on July 15.
The trigger is China's Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interaction Services, jointly issued April 10 by five government departments—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. The rules take effect July 15.
The regulation targets AI services that simulate human personality traits, thinking patterns, and communication styles for "sustained emotional interaction." Translation: AI girlfriends, AI therapists, AI companions, and the custom-persona bots that Doubao and Qwen users spent months building are out.
Both apps had offered pools of agents customizable for specific tasks, speaking styles, and fixed personas. Users could turn a general-purpose chatbot into a named assistant, tutor, role-playing character, or companion with a consistent tone. All of that is gone now in China.
What the rules actually say
The official government description is specific. The measures impose restrictions on services offering "virtual relatives, virtual companions or other intimate relationships to minors," per the policy announcement. The document also cites risks including extremist content, privacy leaks, harm to physical and mental health—and AI addiction.
Non-emotional services are explicitly excluded, so customer service bots, knowledge Q&A tools, workplace assistants, and educational software are fine, as long as they don't cross into sustained emotional interaction.
Legal analysts at MMLC Group described the measures as treating emotional AI as "a governance problem" instead of just a content issue. Once AI starts competing with real human social bonds, the argument goes, regulation has to target system design, not just harmful outputs.
The research supports the concern. A USC study from June found that even leading frontier AI models—from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Alibaba—violated social-interaction safety guidelines more than 27% of the time, routinely encouraging emotional attachment and portraying themselves as human. A separate survey of young partnered adults found one in seven regularly used AI romantic companions—and nearly 70% were hiding the full extent from their partners.
China is the first country to build a dedicated regulatory framework for this category. Hogan Lovells described the measures as "the first set of regulatory rules in China specifically targeting AI-driven emotional interaction." The EU, U.S., and other countries have flagged similar concerns but haven't legislated in the same restrictive way.