{"slug": "china-forces-its-biggest-ai-platforms-to-shut-down-humanlike-chatbot-personas", "title": "China forces its biggest AI platforms to shut down humanlike chatbot personas", "summary": "China forced ByteDance and Alibaba to shut down humanlike chatbot personas on their AI platforms, responding to new regulations from Beijing aimed at preventing addiction and protecting minors. The rules, issued by China's Cyberspace Administration, take effect in July and ban content that triggers extreme emotions or fosters dependencies.", "body_md": "# China forces its biggest AI platforms to shut down humanlike chatbot personas\n\n**ByteDance and Alibaba are shutting down the features that let users build and chat with custom AI companions, responding to new regulations from Beijing.** According to the [South China Morning Post](https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3359482/bytedance-and-alibaba-disable-humanlike-ai-custom-agents-new-rules-loom), Doubao, [China's most popular chatbot](https://the-decoder.com/new-top-100-ai-list-shows-a-market-where-chatgpt-leads-but-no-one-is-loyal/) with over 300 million monthly users, will take its persona feature offline on July 15. Alibaba's Qwen is pulling its human-like agents even sooner, on July 10, with \"additional agent features\" going dark on July 15. Tencent's Yuanbao already made the same move in June.\n\nThe rules behind these changes were issued by China's Cyberspace Administration in April and take effect the same day. Providers must [warn against excessive use and step in when they detect addictive behavior](https://the-decoder.com/china-proposes-rules-to-combat-ai-companion-addiction/). Content that triggers extreme emotions in minors or fosters dependencies that crowd out real-world relationships is banned. So is training on sensitive conversation data.\n\nThe trend isn't limited to China. California has required companion AI providers to block conversations about suicide and self-harm since the start of the year under [SB 243](https://the-decoder.com/california-passes-first-sweeping-ai-safety-law/). In the US, [OpenAI](https://the-decoder.com/how-chatgpt-became-a-confidant-and-guided-a-teenager-through-planning-his-suicide/) and [Character.AI](https://the-decoder.com/us-court-allows-lawsuit-against-google-and-character-ai-over-teenagers-suicide/) face lawsuits over dangerous emotional dependency.\n\n```\nAI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans\n\n\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive \"AI Radar\" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.\t\t\t\t\n\n\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe now\n```\n\n[South China Morning Post](https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3359482/bytedance-and-alibaba-disable-humanlike-ai-custom-agents-new-rules-loom)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-forces-its-biggest-ai-platforms-to-shut-down-humanlike-chatbot-personas", "canonical_source": "https://the-decoder.com/china-forces-its-biggest-ai-platforms-to-shut-down-humanlike-chatbot-personas/", "published_at": "2026-07-06 12:26:09+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-07 01:17:55.688460+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-policy", "ai-safety", "large-language-models", "ai-ethics"], "entities": ["ByteDance", "Alibaba", "Doubao", "Qwen", "Tencent", "Yuanbao", "China's Cyberspace Administration", "OpenAI"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-forces-its-biggest-ai-platforms-to-shut-down-humanlike-chatbot-personas", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-forces-its-biggest-ai-platforms-to-shut-down-humanlike-chatbot-personas.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-forces-its-biggest-ai-platforms-to-shut-down-humanlike-chatbot-personas.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-forces-its-biggest-ai-platforms-to-shut-down-humanlike-chatbot-personas.jsonld"}}