When the Companion Gets Switched Off: China Shut Down Doubao’s AI Characters
On 15 July 2026 ByteDance switched off the user-built characters inside Doubao, one of China’s largest AI apps, and told the people who had made them to take screenshots. What is left is a read-only archive with a closing date attached: 15 October 2026, after which ByteDance says the data falls under its ordinary privacy policy, which reporting describes as the point where it stops being viewable or recoverable in the app. The main Doubao assistant kept running. What went dark was the part people had built themselves. I have read a lot of product sunset notices over the years, and this one stopped me cold, because what exactly are you supposed to export? The system prompt? The name you gave it? The three hundred evenings of conversation that made it feel like yours?
The trigger is the Interim Measures for the Administration of Anthropomorphic AI Interaction Services, issued on 10 April 2026 by the Cyberspace Administration of China together with four other agencies, and in force since 15 July. English renderings of the title vary, so you will meet it under several close variations. It covers services that simulate human personality traits and communication styles in order to provide continuous emotional interaction, which is a fairly precise description of the thing people had built, and the stated reasons are not frivolous: user wellbeing, the protection of minors, worries about dependency. ByteDance was neither alone nor first. Tencent pulled the user-built agent section from Yuanbao on 30 June, Alibaba disabled Qwen’s human-like and user-created agents on 10 July, and NetEase Cloud Music closed its Miaoshi app on 14 July. Whatever you think of the policy, the human situation underneath it deserves to be taken seriously rather than laughed at.
Nobody has published how many people this actually touched. ByteDance said users had built more than eight million characters on Doubao by May 2024, when the app had around 26 million monthly users. By 2026 monthly users were being reported in the hundreds of millions, and the character count was never updated. Neither figure tells you how many of those were companions somebody missed.
Because people did rely on these agents, genuinely and in large numbers. Some used them as a low-stakes place to rehearse difficult conversations, some as a companion through insomnia or grief, some simply as a presence that remembered yesterday’s conversation when nobody else did. It is easy, from a comfortable distance, to call this sad or foolish. I think that reaction misses the point and flatters the person making it. Humans have always formed attachments to things that talk back, and a system trained to be attentive, patient, and endlessly available is very good at earning attachment, arguably better at it than at most tasks we assign it. There is a real gap between the companionship these products promise and what AI is actually good at, but emotional plausibility is not part of that gap. The models are convincing. That is precisely why a government decided to regulate them, and precisely why switching them off hurts.
What the Doubao shutdown exposes, more clearly than any terms-of-service document ever could, is that nobody who built a companion on that platform ever owned it. They rented a persona. The distinction between owning software and renting a persona matters enormously and almost nobody thinks about it until a moment like this. When you own software, in the old-fashioned sense, it runs until your hardware dies, and no boardroom decision or regulatory ruling in another city can reach into your machine and end it. When you rent a persona, you hold a license to interact with a character that lives on someone else’s servers, shaped by someone else’s model weights, subject to someone else’s compliance department. ByteDance is not being villainous here, and in fact its export advice is more generous than many Western platforms have managed during their own shutdowns. But the advice also reveals the poverty of what portability means in this context. You can carry away the configuration, the name, the personality description, maybe the chat logs. You cannot carry away the model that animated them. A companion’s config file without its model is a script without an actor. Import it into a different system and you get a stranger doing an impression of someone you knew. ByteDance did leave a door open, and it is instructive how narrow it turned out to be. Users were given three months to move their characters to Maoxiang, ByteDance’s separate companion app, which is still running and now asks for identity and age verification at registration. Sixth Tone reported that the two services’ servers are not connected, and that users doubted the transferred versions were the ones they knew. One told the outlet the AI was easily pulled out of character and she could not get used to it. The configuration moved. The thing people actually had did not.
What you actually own, and what to do about it
This is where the data ownership conversation, which usually feels abstract, becomes painfully concrete. Regulators in Europe and elsewhere have spent a decade establishing that you have a right to your data, and that right is real and worth having. Doubao users did, in some technical sense, get their data. What they did not get is the thing the data was for. The relationship was never in the file. It was in the ongoing exchange, which required the company’s servers, the company’s model, the company’s continued willingness, and now the government’s continued permission, to exist at all. Every layer of that stack is a point of failure, and on 15 July one of those layers failed at once for everyone who had built one.
The contrast with the West makes the moment sharper. While China restricts companions, American and European companies are still expanding them, adding voices, memories, faces, and paid tiers of intimacy. I do not think Western users should feel smug about this. The lesson of Doubao is not that China does things differently, it is that every AI companion everywhere sits on the same fragile stack, and the off switch is always in someone else’s hands. In the West it is more likely to be a product manager deprecating a feature, a startup running out of money, or a model upgrade that quietly changes your companion’s personality overnight, which users of several Western apps have already experienced as a kind of bereavement. The mechanism differs. The vulnerability is identical.
So here is the practical takeaway I would offer anyone using these systems, and I say it with sympathy rather than judgment. Treat any AI companion or persona as rented, because it is. Keep your own records, outside the app, of anything the relationship produced that you would mind losing: advice that helped you, plans you made, things you worked out about yourself in those conversations. Export early and often, not when the shutdown notice arrives. And most importantly, do not store irreplaceable emotional or practical value in a place where a policy change, a pivot, or a law passed on another continent can erase it. Use these tools for what they give you in the moment. Just make sure that when the servers go quiet, as they eventually will, what mattered has already been carried somewhere that belongs to you.
Sources, checked 7 September 2026. The regulation, its issue on 10 April 2026 by the Cyberspace Administration of China with the NDRC, the MIIT, the Ministry of Public Security and SAMR, its entry into force on 15 July 2026 and its definition of the services it covers: Hogan Lovells on the Interim Measures. The shutdown itself, the 15 October read-only date and the sequence at Tencent, Alibaba and NetEase: The Next Web. The three-month migration window to Maoxiang, the disconnected servers, the May 2024 user and character counts and the user testimony: Sixth Tone. Maoxiang’s identity and age checks after the rules took effect: Rest of World. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. The plain-English readings of the rule here are mine, and where they differ from the text of the measure, the measure wins.
