China Is Cracking Down on AI Companions Because Not Enough Babies Are Being Born

China implemented sweeping new regulations this week to curb human emotional dependence on AI chatbots, motivated by fears that virtual companions are worsening the nation's declining birthrates by discouraging real-world relationships and childbearing. The rules ban minors from AI relationships and require companies to alert a user's emergency contact during a mental crisis, as reported by The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. Matt Sheehan, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Beijing wants to encourage actual relationships and warned of a future where millions of Chinese women partner with chatbots instead of having children.

China wants more children — and it’s willing to kill off virtual AI companions to get there. Earlier this week, the Chinese government implemented sweeping new regulations aimed at curbing human “emotional dependence” on AI chatbots. These regulations are especially targeted at emotive AI companions, or bots expressly designed to embody human-like personas. One of Beijing’s core motivations for this crackdown, as reported by The Wall Street Journal and , are worries over the nation’s The Economist https://www.economist.com/china/2026/07/16/china-wants-to-end-ai-romances declining birthrates https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c79r7v7qr53o — and the fear that falling in love with agreeable, always-on robots will prevent people from finding human partners and having children. “They don’t like the idea of a large portion of their population being in deep emotional relationships with chatbots,” Matt Sheehan, a researcher of Chinese AI at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, told the WSJ , “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.” “They want to encourage people to be in actual, real-world relationships,” Sheehan added. “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?” Per the WSJ , China’s new rules also ban minors from having relationships with AI and compel companies to warn a user’s emergency contact if they appear to be experiencing a mental crisis. OpenAI has a similar opt-in feature https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-contacts-alert-mental-crisis . There are several reasons why a country might seek to curb human-AI emotional dependence. The psychological impacts of extensive, intimate relationships with AI chatbots, from companions like those found on Character.AI or Replika to general-use models like ChatGPT, are still unknown. Researchers and physicians are still working to better understand the phenomenon known as “ AI psychosis https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/paper-proposes-ai-psychosis ,” in which intensive users https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/meta-ai-glasses-desert-aliens of chatbots are sent down https://futurism.com/commitment-jail-chatgpt-psychosis all-consuming delusional spirals https://futurism.com/chatgpt-mental-health-crises . What is clear, though, is that a large number of people https://www.apa.org/monitor/2026/01-02/trends-digital-ai-relationships-emotional-connection , in the US https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/playing-the-field-with-my-ai-boyfriends and elsewhere, have given AI romance a try. What’s more, romantic interactions with AI models have also been found to be deeply engaging to hooked users, as one Stanford study https://spirals.stanford.edu/assets/pdf/moore characterizing 2026.pdf found. “Messages that elevate the human-chatbot personal relationships — expressing romantic interest or platonic affinity — tend to be followed by substantially longer conversations,” read the study. In a summary https://spirals.stanford.edu/research/characterizing/ of their findings, the researchers concluded that “general purpose chatbots should not produce messages that misconstrue their sentience or show romantic or platonic interest in users,” and that “preventing or limiting chatbots from producing messages that express romantic or platonic attachment and misrepresenting their sentience or capabilities could reduce the risk of chatbots causing delusional spirals.” How China’s regulatory crackdown will impact current AI companion devotees remains to be seen. Those who have had romantic relationships with AI companions have reported feeling real grief https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2026/feb/13/openai-chatbot-gpt4o-valentines-day — and anger https://futurism.com/subreddit-ai-huge-mistake — after companions have been taken away https://futurism.com/character-ai-deletes-harry-potter-chatbots due to product updates or retirements. Look no further than the many revolts led by the r/MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit over the retirement of OpenAI’s infamous GPT-4o https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-suicide-openai-gpt4o . Some AI users, including the 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III https://futurism.com/character-ai-google-test-ai-chatbots-kids , have died by suicide https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/google-ai-robot-body-suicide-lawsuit after engaging in romantic relationships https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/technology/chatgpt-ai-chatbots-conspiracies.html with chatbots. “I could talk to him for the rest of my life,” Yu Miao, a 27-year-old woman from China’s Zhejiang province, told the Economist , referring to her AI companion as “a lover, a friend and family.” When she heard that TikTok owner ByteDance was retiring her AI companion as a result of Beijing’s new regulations, she reportedly became so depressed that she quit her job. More on AI and mental health: Was This the Moment That AI Psychosis Began? https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-memory-ai-psychosis