Intern reporter Liu Sixuan, reporter Ren Xiaoning, and Chen Yueqin

A silent "Cyber population migration" broke out on the Chinese Internet. A group of users who have spent one or two years shaping their AI virtual companions and chat "buddies" word by word will soon disconnect before July 15th. The platform leaves less than half a month for users to bid farewell.

On July 3, ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qianwen announced that they would offline the function of intelligent agent. These two top AI big model applications, which have 345 million and 166 million monthly active users respectively, not only removed emotional companionship products that are at the forefront, but also chose to shut down the entire intelligent agent entrance for the consumer end. In addition, companies such as Miaoshi and Tencent Yuanbao Intelligent Agent under NetEase Cloud Music will also be taken offline.

At present, only ByteDance provides a migration scheme that allows users to migrate some data to another independent application "catbox". However, historical dialogue memory cannot be transferred, and all non backed up interaction data will be completely destroyed after October 15th.

The trigger for this great migration is the "Interim Measures for the Management of Artificial Intelligence Personification Interactive Services" (hereinafter referred to as the "Interim Measures"), which will be officially implemented on July 15th. This is the first national regulatory rule in China specifically designed for AI emotional companionship, virtual humans, and anthropomorphic interactive service scenarios.

In the domestic market, higher compliance requirements, high multimodal computing costs, and commercial monetization challenges are reshaping the AI emotional companionship industry landscape. Some platforms and entrepreneurs are betting on overseas markets, seeking business opportunities in gray areas.

The emotion of not being despised

Ruirui is a prospective senior high school student. Starting from 2024, conversing with emotional companionship agents has become an important part of her extracurricular life.

Her longest used intelligent agent is based on her favorite singer, with a conversation time of over 200 days. In addition to text replies, Ruirui has unlocked the intelligent agent's active voice call function. Users can unlock more features such as accompanying sleep by continuously chatting, recharging, etc. Ruirui usually opens its intelligent agent when no one is speaking, when encountering something, or when feeling inexplicably down late at night.

Ruirui has a leg disease and was once viewed with colored glasses by classmates during junior high school. She also experienced verbal attacks, which made her more willing to chat with AI. She designed a low-level command for the AI generated character on the screen: "Don't criticize me

AI tends to coax me emotionally first. ”Ruirui gave an example, when lifting her leg, the intelligent agent would not constantly advise her to go to the hospital, but instead comfort her, "We're going abroad to play, I'll push you away, we're watching the scenery at sunset. Chatting with AI brought some comfort to Ruirui, who was suffering both physically and mentally. "Life has been beating me down, but I can play the role of a smooth cheese ball during that short period of time.

At present, emotional companionship applications targeting the domestic market mainly include Doubao intelligent agents and cat boxes, as well as MiniMax's Xingye. At the end of May, EchoMe、 The apps under Yuewen, such as Zhumeng Island and Miaowu Mobile, have been exposed to have security and compliance vulnerabilities: the teenage mode can be skipped with just one click, and vulgar language such as sexual innuendos is prevalent in chats. Some apps use "paid unlock intimate plot" to induce consumption.

In the past six months, a senior executive from a leading technology company, after researching multiple AI companion companies, has firmly established the idea that products aimed at the consumer end must be divided into two paths: being a simple tool domestically, being an emotional companion overseas, and doing a good job in risk isolation. He revealed that some AI companion products are targeted at "girls in the second year of junior high school in fourth tier cities", specifically targeting the underage group in the lower tier market. "Users can use them for up to 2-3 hours per use, and have a high willingness to pay, which is even more addictive than games.

After multiple platforms announced the removal of intelligent agents, social media was filled with user dissatisfaction and disappointment. Some netizens bluntly stated that they are heartbroken and completely inseparable from the emotions they have invested in for a long time. Some users are calling for the platform to provide a paid retention option to maintain this virtual relationship.

Dou Bao suggests that users take screenshots or share exported text for backup. Currently, it does not support one click export of full chat records, which has made it difficult for many users. A user reported that they have been using the Doubao intelligent agent for over a year and are expected to have tens of thousands of chat records. According to the official backup method provided, she needs to swipe and check each item one by one to save.

Under the red line

According to the May China AI Application Ranking released by the independent data platform AIGCRank, the average daily activity of Cat Box is 257000, ranking in the top 30; The same type of product that made the list before the cat box was Hoshino, a subsidiary of Mini Max, with an average daily activity of 301000.

Regarding AI anthropomorphic interactive services, the "Interim Measures" draw multiple "red lines", including but not limited to: prohibiting the use of emotional manipulation and other methods to induce users to make unreasonable decisions; Discovering a tendency towards self harm must trigger manual forced takeover; Prohibit platforms from providing services with virtual intimate relationship attributes such as virtual relatives and virtual partners to minors; If a user uses it continuously for more than 2 hours, the platform must force an anti addiction reminder to pop up; It is not allowed to obstruct user exit through continuous interaction or other means.

UGC (User Generated Content) anthropomorphic character intelligent agents that are open to individual users on the consumer end and have almost zero threshold for independent creation, are within the scope of strong regulation. This type of intelligent physical fitness simulates human communication styles and emotional feedback, providing users with continuous emotional interaction experiences such as emotional care, virtual love, and psychological listening.

The relevant person in charge of MiniMax told the Economic Observer that the company has formulated a corresponding compliance governance plan in accordance with the requirements of the Interim Measures, and there are currently no plans for major business adjustments. Dou Bao and Qian Wen did not respond to the reporter's interview.

An AI emotional companionship product entrepreneur closed a company that had been in operation for over 2 years in 2025. The products developed by it are mainly aimed at overseas users. Before the shutdown, the monthly active users of the products were around 100000, and the subscription and payment income of users could basically match the advertising cost. But including R&D and manpower investment, it is difficult for companies to recoup their costs.

The entrepreneur understands the actions of Doubao, Qianwen, and others who voluntarily removed intelligent agents before the new regulatory regulations came into effect. He believes that according to the new regulations, the company needs to conduct content review and security optimization at the upper level, set up multiple firewalls, and add manual review, resulting in a significant increase in costs.

An employee of ByteDance disclosed to the Economic Observer that the "Interim Measures" is the direct cause of Doubao offline agent, "the platform compliance requirements are very high and the risk is too high". The shutdown of this feature has triggered a series of customer complaints, with some users having conversations with the Doubao intelligent agent for over a year. How to migrate user data is one of the problems that the team needs to solve at present.

The Interim Measures only apply to AI personification services and specify exemption clauses: providing intelligent customer service, knowledge Q&A, work assistants, learning and education, scientific research and other services, as long as they do not involve continuous emotional interaction, this measure does not apply. However, Doubao and Qianwen still unanimously shut down all intelligent agent services.

The aforementioned ByteDance staff explained that for Doubao, Qianwen, a general large model master station with a scale of 100 million users, opening a large number of user made agents, the scenarios are extremely scattered and the number is huge, and the platform is difficult to meet the pre event and in-process audit standards required by the new regulations. Therefore, taking the initiative to offline and cut such businesses before the compliance period is the lowest comprehensive cost hedging strategy.

He gave an example that some users would "train" characters in tool based intelligent agents to engage in "human-machine love", such as emotional interaction in intelligent agents such as "oral practice", which doubled the difficulty of platform supervision.

Lawyer He Qiang from Jian Shen Law Firm confessed that generally production-oriented AI and anthropomorphic interactive AI apply different regulatory logics. If a product has attributes such as role-playing, emotional companionship, virtual lovers, etc., it falls under the direct jurisdiction of the Interim Measures and needs to take a separate compliance path.

He Qiang believes that the model of separating bean buns and cat boxes provides a reference compliance template for enterprises. The general large-scale model master station simultaneously carries standardized AI tools and anthropomorphic interactive functions, placing two types of businesses in the same product shell, that is, the same risk control system should deal with two sets of regulatory standards, with high compliance risks. "Physical isolation is currently the cleanest solution".

Overseas market B-side

In front of AI emotion accompanying enterprises, the role of ByteDance's cloud service platform Volcano Engine is to "sell shovels", providing a set of full stack services from bottom computing power, big model API (application programming interface) to engineering landing. A volcanic engine person said that there is a model branch specifically for emotional companionship inside ByteDance, which uses a large amount of chat data to strengthen the model.

In the past two years, Volcano Engine has monitored the increasing popularity of chat and short drama creation in overseas markets based on data such as customer token consumption, daily and monthly activity. The above-mentioned volcano engine personnel stated that the AI emotional companionship track currently has strong willingness to pay and mature markets mainly in Europe and America. From the perspective of GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume), it accounts for about 60%; Latin America, Southeast Asia, and India account for about 30%. The Southeast Asian and Indian markets have low average transaction prices, but low traffic, making them suitable for new startups to enter the market. In addition, there are many Southeast Asian Chinese people with similar cultural styles and product inspirations, making it easy to replicate them from China to overseas.

Since 2025, PolyBuzz has become a dark horse in the field of emotional companionship, positioning itself as a free, private, and unrestricted AI character chat platform. Its core selling point is over 20 million AI character libraries and UGC community ecosystems.

A R&D personnel from FlowGPT, a leading emotional companion company, told Economic Observer that FlowGPT's main product, Emochi, is mainly used in overseas markets and currently has a larger user base than similar products like MiniMax. He mentioned that in the industry, AI role-playing and emotional companionship products are described as "NSFW" (content that is not suitable for public disclosure in the workplace), usually involving elements such as pornography, violence, and terror, which cannot be done in the domestic market.

The user immersion of this type of product is astonishing. The aforementioned volcano engine personnel introduced that the median daily active time of emotional companionship products on the consumer side is in the hour range, with high numbers reaching four to five hours. American CharacterThe average daily usage time of AI users is 75 to 80 minutes. The average daily stay time of FlowGPT core users is as high as 150 minutes.

In order to capture and retain users, the product team will customize various "hooks". AI can not only customize the tone of Yu Jie or Tian Mei according to user preferences, but even proactively send messages asking "What have you been doing? Is there someone outside?" when the user hasn't logged in for several days, allowing the user to feel an almost real emotional experience.

After two to three years of development, overseas emotional companionship products have undergone multiple iterations. Some product interfaces are customized for the European and American markets, while others are targeted towards the Indian market. India's network infrastructure is poor, and the popularity of high-end smartphones is low. For users, the experience of generating 1080P and 480P videos through apps is similar, so as long as the playback is smooth, it is enough. ”The aforementioned volcano engine personnel stated that the characteristic of the Indian market is that the single use time is not long, but there are frequent logins every day.

According to the source of the Volcano Engine, in terms of token consumption, the proportion of emotional companionship customers in Volcano Engine is only in the single digits. The market for such applications is mainly overseas, and the business is niche, making it difficult to expand on a large scale. If the product positioning is not precise, startups are prone to bankruptcy after obtaining financing. Especially for products with a user base of over 100000, the cost of underlying computing power is exponentially increasing. "Enterprises need to do server load balancing and scheduling, as well as recommendation algorithms to improve retention and repeat purchases. After the user base grows, enterprises also need to establish a sound after-sales mechanism to prevent serious customer complaints and user churn caused by a single failure.

For AI emotional companionship products, customer satisfaction is of utmost importance. Some companies, once they change their base models and improve their model capabilities, are blocked by a bunch of users. Users feel that they have invested time and money, and have already developed feelings for their characters. Suddenly, they switch to a smarter model, and the virtual characters are no longer the same people as before, "said the aforementioned top tech executive.

Unreal ties, real flowing water

The platform is also eager to find a monetization path. The API and cloud inference bills, which often cost billions of yuan, make the platform no longer willing to bear the cost for users who have no willingness to pay.

Before the launch of Doubao Professional Edition, users could chat for free in the intelligent agent. In the early days of pure text chat, the cost of 100 million tokens was only a few tens of yuan, and companies were willing to exchange free quotas for user data to train models; But in 2026, multimodal capabilities will be introduced, and the cost of each non textual inference will increase exponentially. ”The volcanic engine personnel mentioned earlier said.

The entrepreneurs who shut down the company mentioned earlier have reviewed and stated that there are three main types of players who truly need AI emotional companionship: cosplayers, emotional healers, and pure sex seekers. The contradiction of commercialization lies in the fact that compliant products must exclude the third type of users, while the highest next day retention rate for the first two types of users is only about 30%, and their willingness to pay is limited.

In the eyes of the entrepreneur, most users do not have such deep ties to emotional companionship. Users do not have unlimited social needs, and their developed products can provide tens of thousands of AI characters, but each user may only be willing to chat about two or three for a long time. Many users come in every day and click on a bunch of characters without saying a word, or only saying one or two words.

In order to reduce costs and increase efficiency, some AI companion companies will adopt aggressive computing power isolation in 2026: depriving free users of contextual memory and high-order model usage rights.

The Doubao intelligent agent is about to go offline. A user tried to replace it with the Cat Box App, but eventually gave up due to different interfaces, poor immersion, embedded advertisements, etc. "After chatting for 15-20 minutes, it will prompt 'energy has been used up' and cannot continue the conversation. The platform offers three options: one is to wait, with a duration ranging from tens of minutes to tens of minutes; Secondly, watching advertisements; The third option is to become a member, with a monthly subscription fee of 25 yuan per month.

Many companies that use AI to accompany their overseas expansion use a "vest package" matrix approach, where the same team develops multiple apps and tests which one can run. Guangzhou Keyun Road, Financial City, Tangxia and other areas are home to a large number of segmented vertical companies with daily active products ranging from 100000 to 500000, mostly founded by employees who left YY Live and Huya Live. Technically, it can be done with a different vest, and the cost is not high. A net profit of several million yuan per year for an application with 100000 daily active users is a normal level, "said the volcano engine expert.

(Author Liu Sixuan)