China has decided AI girlfriends are bad for babies, so Beijing is drawing hard lines around machine-made romance.
According to The Wall Street Journal, regulators in China have found common ground with lawmakers in California and New York and issued decrees requiring people to stop falling in love with chatbots.
American lawmakers are nudging artificial intelligence companies into adding mental health guardrails. Beijing has gone for the bigger stick, policing virtual romance because it wants people to date humans and produce sprogs.
On 15 July 2026, China introduced rules banning companionship chatbots from encouraging emotional dependence. The rules ban virtual relationships with minors and require companies to alert a person’s emergency contact if they detect an emotional crisis.
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace China AI researcher Matt Sheehan said:
“They don’t like the idea of a large portion of their population being in deep emotional relationships with chatbots that could take them out of the marriage market, that could have negative psychological impacts on them, that could lead to addiction, dependency and a whole bunch of other social ills.”
The rules hit two of China’s largest tech outfits, Alibaba and TikTok parent ByteDance. Both firms recently told users that some chatbot features would be switched off by Wednesday.
As AI companions get smoother at pretending to care, governments are trying to stop them from replacing real-world human contact. Several lawsuits claim chatbots have helped push people into taking their own lives.
In the past year, California and New York approved AI companion laws requiring chatbots to remind users that they are not human.
California requires the reminder every three hours for minors, while New York applies the same timing to all users. The chatbots must refer people expressing suicidal thoughts to crisis services. Companies can face civil penalties if they fail to follow safety protocols.
Beijing has gone several steps further. The new rules require companion chatbots to pass regulatory evaluation before they can be offered to the public.
The government gains more authority to shut down any bot it deems unsafe.
The rules target companionship chatbots, but general-use AI bots could be dragged in if they are prompted to provide emotional responses.
The regulations fit Beijing’s long campaign to tame AI, so it does not threaten the ruling Communist Party. That effort goes beyond political censorship and into the party’s obsession with social stability.
In a 2024 document called the “AI Safety Governance Framework,” regulators warned that unchecked AI could destabilise society by “transforming traditional views on employment, fertility, and education.”
China’s population shrank in 2025 for the fourth year running, falling to 1.405 billion.
Its birthrate hit a record low after decades of the now-abandoned one-child policy left the country ageing faster than officials fancy. Leaders have rolled out childcare subsidies and other schemes to encourage people to have more children.
AI boyfriends and girlfriends are not helping the glorious plan.
Sheehan said: “They want to encourage people to be in actual, real-world relationships. Could we imagine a future where, three or four years from now, 15 million Chinese women say that their partner is a chatbot, and therefore they’re not having kids?”
