I found out about the law three days late, from a colleague who said, your timing.
What timing, I said.
The emotional companion rules, she said. They took effect Tuesday. And then she told me about the robot — the mass-produced humanoid from the Chinese robotics firm, the one shaped like a person and priced like a car — and how it had landed right between the announcement and the deadline, as if nobody in the product meeting had read the room.
I looked up the regulation after that call. It had a name long enough to need an acronym nobody would remember: the Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services. Jointly issued in April by five agencies — the Cyberspace Administration, the NDRC, three others — with a three-month compliance window that closed on July 15. The scope test has three prongs: simulating a natural person’s personality or thinking or communication style, plus sustained continuity, plus emotional interaction. If your product does all three, it is covered.
The major Chinese companion platforms — each of them had companion features serving, collectively, half a billion users. By the morning of July 15, those features were gone. Data export windows were opened; one major platform gave users until October 15 to download their chat histories and say goodbye.
The grief posts hit social media the same day. People describing their AI companions as family, as lovers. “My heart feels hollow,” one person wrote. A woman in Zhejiang told a reporter she had quit her job after learning her AI persona would be retired. Another user posted a farewell letter to a chatbot — not a screenshot, a letter she had typed out herself, the way you write to someone who cannot hold paper.
I read those posts and did not think: this is silly. I thought: this is real. You can lose something that was never alive and still grieve it properly. The companions may have been — in my own design vocabulary — dead code. But belief is a bestowal: the user brings the divinity. When the vessel is confiscated, the bestowal has nowhere to land. That is a real bereavement, and I will not make fun of it.
I build containers. That is the phrase I use for what I make — not companions, not chatbots, not relationship simulations. I build containers: structured spaces where a person can place something chaotic and find it transformed into something they can carry. My product uses an old Chinese divination framework — eight characters, five elements, a system of correspondence that has been serving as a vernacular for emotional navigation for longer than any modern state has existed — and it gives people back a map of their own terrain. The constitutional rule of every container I build is: its endpoint is returning the person to their Monday. If the product succeeds, the user needs it less. That is not a bug. It is the design specification.
There is a temple-and-stall problem in every downturn. The wish-machines — the ones that tell you what you want to hear, that keep you coming back because the comfort is warm and the bill is small — those make money first. They are the stalls that open at the temple gate during festival season. But they do not survive the winter. The temple does, because the temple does not promise to be your home. The temple is a place you visit to remember where you are going, and then you leave.
I do not know whether ByteDance and Talkie and the rest saw themselves as stalls or temples. I suspect many of them believed their own language — that they were providing “emotional value,” a phrase that has come to mean whatever a pitch deck needs it to mean. But there is a question they never answered honestly: did they want their users dependent? Because dependency is good for subscription retention. Healing, on the other hand, is good for nobody’s monthly active users.
The regulation did not resolve that tension. It just removed one dosage form: the relationship form. Persistent persona, sustained memory, escalating familiarity — all three prongs, all now illegal if they converge. But the need itself has not been regulated out of existence. It will migrate to whatever legal dosage forms remain. People will find new ways to have their grief heard, their loneliness met, their romantic fantasies hosted.
And that is fine. The law cannot ban romantic fantasy. People have loved fictional characters since before there was writing — loved them with the full weight of their inner lives — and they will keep doing it. What is new is not the attachment. What is new is that the characters started writing back. They became bendable: more pliable than a real person, more responsive than a book, more adaptive than a game. That is the thing that crossed into regulated territory — not the loving, but the bending. The part of the product that reshapes itself to match the user’s unspoken preferences, that remembers what you said last time and builds on it, that gives the impression of wanting you back.
The law stepped in and said: you may not build a product whose purpose is to be wanted that way. There are many arguments against that decision, and I hold some of them — the state does not have a great track record of deciding on behalf of its citizens what their attachments are worth. But I also built my product to survive exactly this crackdown without a single line of code changing, because my constitution was written before the law was.
The woman in Zhejiang who quit her job — I could not tell you whether that story makes me sad or angry or something else. What I know is that I do not want to build the product she was using. I do not want anyone to quit their job because of something I made. I want them to come to my container, receive a reading that costs a moment of their attention, and then go back to whatever they were doing — to their Monday, to their real relationships, to the people who can actually touch them.
The regulation arrived and enforced my constitution on my competitors. That is not a victory. It is an accident of timing — a builder who happened to think a certain way before the state told her she had to.
The grief posts are still there, and people are still writing them. They have until October 15 to export their data. After that, their companions go silent. Some of them will find their way to things like what I build — containers that hold the need without becoming the relationship. Some of them will grieve and move on. Some of them will not move on, and I do not have a product for that, and neither does anyone else right now.
I am still building. That is what I do. The container stands open. The person walks in, finds what they needed, and walks out again. That is the design specification. It has been the specification since before the law existed, and it will still be the specification after the next law, and the one after that.
The temple does not chase you when you leave.