China's "Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services" took effect on July 15, forcing ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen to disable their AI agent creation features. Users can no longer create new humanlike agents, and all existing user-built companions have stopped functioning.
Both companies say users can still view agent configurations and chat histories during a transition window, but that access ends October 15, 2026, when the data becomes permanently unrecoverable. Doubao and Qwen are advising users to back up important conversations via screenshots or text exports before the deadline.
The rules are China's first national framework targeting AI services that simulate human emotional interaction, issued jointly by the Cyberspace Administration of China, the National Development and Reform Commission, and other ministries. They mandate anti-addiction systems, usage notifications, and instant-exit mechanisms — requirements regulators say are incompatible with persistent-memory companion agents designed to maintain long-term emotional bonds with users.