China switches off the AI that keeps you company - and leaves the AI that does your work alone
China's Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services take effect tomorrow, 15 July. Co-issued in April by the Cyberspace Administration of China and four other agencies, they govern any service that simulates human personality to provide sustained emotional interaction. In the run-up, the country's two biggest consumer AI apps pulled the features at their heart: ByteDance's Doubao took its agent function offline for 15th July, and Alibaba's Qwen killed its humanlike and user-created agents on 10th July and its wider agent services five days later. Read fast, it looks like China is switching off AI agents. It isn't. Customer-service bots, workplace assistants, knowledge Q&A and education tools are explicitly excluded - provided they steer clear of sustained emotional engagement. The rules demand anti-addiction systems, mandatory usage notifications, instant-exit mechanisms, real-time detection of unhealthy dependence, no companion services for minors, and guardian consent under 14. Doubao is letting users view their old configurations read-only until 15th October, after which the data is gone. Qwen users got no grace period at all.
What it actually means
The regulator didn't draw the line at capability. It drew it at attachment - and that's a line that runs straight through product design, not through your model choice. The things that make an assistant feel good to use are the same things now under scrutiny: persistent memory, a consistent persona, the small warmth that makes someone come back. Nobody at ByteDance or Alibaba tried to build a compliant version; they shut the feature off, because the rules fix no technical threshold for what "emotional interaction" means and nobody wanted to find out where it sat by being wrong. Thousands of people lost relationships they'd built over months with no way to export them. If you ship anything with memory, your users' history is a thing they own emotionally and you own technically. Give them a way to take it with them, before someone makes you.
The regulator drew the line at attachment, not capability — and that line runs through your product design.
Source: AI News · Tuesday 14 July 2026