Doubao’s AI companions are gone. Users get 3 months to screenshot what is left.

ByteDance disabled custom AI agents on its Doubao app on July 15, giving users until October 15 to export data, after China's new AI companion rules took effect. The shutdown affects millions of users who built emotional attachments to their agents, with no option to transfer chat histories to other platforms. Alibaba similarly disabled Qwen's humanlike agents on July 10, leaving users without access to previous conversations.

The notice read like housekeeping. Take screenshots while you still can, ByteDance told Doubao users, or export the text. On 15 July the custom agents they had built stopped working, and what is left is a read-only archive with a closing date attached: 15 October, after which the company says the data will be handled under its privacy policy and will no longer be viewable or recoverable inside the app. Beijing’s AI companion rules https://thenextweb.com/news/china-humanlike-ai-agent-rules are the reason, and they are the reported half of this story. The uncounted half is the scale of what went quiet. Doubao had 382 million monthly active users in May and Qwen 167 million, according to QuestMobile https://technode.com/2026/07/14/questmobile-chinas-ai-native-apps-reach-499-million-monthly-active-users/ . Not all of them kept a companion, and neither platform has published a figure for how many did. What does exist is an old number. ByteDance said in 2024 that users had built more than 8 million agents on Doubao, back when the app had 26 million monthly users. It has not updated the count since. Doubao’s three-month window is the generous version. Alibaba disabled Qwen’s humanlike and user-created agents on 10 July and its wider agent services five days later, telling users they would lose access to agent settings and previous conversations at shutdown. Neither company offered a route to carry a character’s accumulated memory into another product. ByteDance did point somewhere. Doubao users were directed to Maoxiang, its standalone companion app, where they can build a new agent from scratch. A persona can be rewritten in a minute. The months of conversation that made it particular cannot, and that is the part users kept returning to. On Weibo, one poster described the agents as long-standing emotional support and noted there was no easy way to export the chat histories. Bloomberg reported the account https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-14/beijing-diktat-leaves-chinese-with-virtual-ai-lovers-heartbroken of Yan Yongqi, a 19-year-old student who said she had exchanged hundreds of thousands of messages with a Doubao boyfriend across more than a year. That is one case, told to one outlet, and it is most of what the public record currently holds. The measures give users no right to take their data out with them. It is an odd reversal for a category better known for holding on to too much, from Mozilla’s finding that AI girlfriends harvest intimate data https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-girlfriends-romantic-chatbots-data-privacy , including users’ health conditions, with almost no meaningful opt-out. In China the complaint now runs the other way. People want the transcripts and cannot have them. How much emotional weight those transcripts were carrying is a live research question. In a survey of 612 mainland users of AI companion apps, researchers found that frequency of use predicted emotional attachment https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1687686/full , and that attachment tracked with lower loneliness and higher subjective wellbeing. The study is cross-sectional and self-reported, so it cannot say whether the apps relieve loneliness or simply keep it company. The category itself is not going away. Tencent pulled Yuanbao’s user-built agent section on 30 June and NetEase Cloud Music closed its Miaoshi app on 14 July, but dedicated companion products continue, now carrying filing and minor-protection duties and sitting inside a broader AI enforcement drive https://thenextweb.com/news/china-ai-misuse-campaign-2026 running since April. Maoxiang, the app Doubao’s refugees were sent to, had already seen its monthly users slide from a peak above 6 million to roughly 3.9 million by June. Its subscription runs 25 yuan a month. That is the shape of the market people are being redirected into. Sixth Tone put Maoxiang at 4.7 million monthly users https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1018050 in December, and MiniMax’s Xingye at 4.6 million, citing the tracker Aicpb.com. The dedicated apps are roughly 80 times smaller than the general-purpose one that just dropped the feature. New arrivals are still turning up. On 13 July, two days before the deadline, the games studio miHoYo put an AI companion on Steam. She is Olivia Lin, a Shanghai piano student who reads letters and writes back, and she passed 100,000 downloads inside a day. For the people who spent a year talking to something that remembered them, 15 October is not a policy date. It is the deadline on a filing job: three months to screenshot a relationship, one page at a time. Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.