The regulation targets services that simulate human personality traits to provide sustained emotional interaction—such as companion bots and virtual partners—while excluding standard productivity or customer-service chatbots. The most stringent provisions apply to minors under 18, who are completely banned from accessing virtual partners or intimate-relationship services. For children under 14, companies must obtain explicit parental consent before providing any child-companionship agent and must implement mandatory minor mode with time limits and guardian controls. Major platforms including Doubao and Qwen Agent faced immediate compliance failures upon the enforcement date, forcing them to delete user data related to their agent architectures to meet the new standards.
China is now the first major nation to comprehensively regulate AI emotional companionship, treating emotional manipulation as a primary legal harm rather than a data privacy issue. This represents a significant shift in AI governance, prioritizing protection of human psychological well-being over commercial growth in a projected $30 billion AI companion market. Attorneys advising companies with AI services should monitor whether this framework influences regulatory approaches in other jurisdictions and assess whether existing chatbot or virtual assistant offerings inadvertently trigger these prohibitions.