Author(s): Chew Loong Nian – AI ENGINEER

Originally published on Towards AI.

What subtitle

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.

After Doubao shut down its user-created “anthropomorphic” agent feature—following similar moves by Tencent and Alibaba—the article argues the real issue is the mismatch between what China’s Interim Measures require and what platforms chose to do for safety and compliance. Although the regulation exempts productivity agents, the platforms deleted the entire user-built layer because auditing which agents would cross into “sustained emotional interaction” is too expensive and error-prone at scale. The piece then breaks down what the law actually demands for in-scope companion-like services (ongoing disclosure, timed interruptions, instant exit, crisis/emergency handling, protections for minors, and safety filings) and translates those requirements into implementable middleware patterns for agent systems, including design priorities like ensuring exit triggers before persona behavior and making crisis handling break character. Finally, it warns that similar companion-shaped-agent regulations are spreading to California and the EU, predicting that compliance-by-amputation, tiered/portable memory, and tighter product roadmaps will shape how AI companions are built going forward.

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Published via Towards AI