China's AI companion law takes effect, forcing Doubao and Qwen to shut agent features

China’s Interim Measures for the Administration of Anthropomorphic AI Interaction Services, issued in April 2026 by the Cyberspace Administration of China and partner agencies, took effect on 15 July, and ByteDance’s Doubao and Alibaba’s Qwen responded by shutting down their personalised AI-agent features rather than retrofitting them to comply. The rules required platforms offering human-like, personalised AI interaction to add anti-addiction prompts, instant-exit mechanisms and real-time detection of user over-dependence — requirements that sat awkwardly with agent products built around continuous, personalised memory.

Both companies stopped users creating new agents and disabled existing user-created ones on the effective date, according to TechNode. Doubao gave users read-only access to their configuration data and chat histories until 15 October 2026, after which the data would be handled under the company’s standard privacy policy and would no longer be recoverable inside the app. Qwen’s wind-down offered no comparable migration window, according to reporting cited in the entry’s sources.

The shutdowns affected companion-style agents that had been used by very large numbers of people on both platforms. Rather than build the compliance infrastructure the new rules demanded, the two largest Chinese AI-agent products chose to discontinue the affected features outright — an outcome regulators had not obviously intended, and one that left the question of what a compliant Chinese AI-companion product looks like still open.