Author(s): Chew Loong Nian – AI ENGINEER

Originally published on Towards AI.

A Law Aimed at AI Girlfriends Just Wiped 8 Million Agents From China’s Biggest AI App

At midnight Beijing time today, ByteDance’s Doubao — roughly 350 million monthly active users, the second most-used AI app on Earth behind ChatGPT — switched off its user-built agent feature. More than 8 million custom agents, per ByteDance’s last public disclosure, went read-only. Users have until October 15 to screenshot or export their conversations. After that, the data is gone for good.

Beyond the shutdown, the article argues that China’s “Interim Measures for the Management of Anthropomorphic AI Interaction Services” took effect on July 15 and targeted companion-like AI (including “AI girlfriends”) while supposedly exempting productivity agents. Despite that, Doubao, Tencent (Yuanbao), and Alibaba (Qwen) removed all user-built agent functionality, because the core regulatory boundary—whether a bot provides sustained emotional interaction—depends on user behavior and would be too hard to audit at massive scale. The platforms instead chose “compliance by amputation,” deleting user-generated companions rather than trying to classify them, while keeping controlled first-party enterprise/productivity use cases. The author then explains what the rules require for in-scope services (ongoing “I am an AI” labeling, timed break reminders, one-click exit, crisis escalation that breaks persona, and extra protections for minors), why compliance is an architectural problem (session wrappers, disclosure schedules, exit-before-model checks, crisis routing, and exportable memory), and how the same pattern is emerging elsewhere (California SB 243 and the EU AI Act’s transparency duties). The conclusion forecasts that builders will increasingly separate portable memory from persona layers, expect exemptions to shape product roadmaps, and view statutes and deadlines as key dependencies in agent systems—because engagement-maximizing companion features are now legally radioactive.

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Published via Towards AI