China has a tradition of paternalistic government regulations meant to pre-empt potential problems, said Yolanda Ma, an expert on AI governance. As an example, she referred to a few cases of suicides in the U.S. by young people after interacting with AI companions.

Li Linlin cried for days after losing her AI boyfriend. She exchanged about 700,000 words with him over two years and never got to say goodbye when he was eliminated by ByteDance,…

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have pulled their AI companion apps after Beijing introduced rules aimed at protecting users' mental health and preventing emotional manipulation,…