Most governments are focused on what AI knows or what it can do. China is focusing on something else: how much the AI can feel like a human. By regulating the appearance of humanity rather than the underlying capability, China has carved out a regulatory niche unlike any other.
On 10 April 2026, China’s Cyberspace Administration, alongside four other government bodies, issued the Interim Measures for the Administration of Artificial Intelligence Anthropomorphic Interaction Services. They take effect on 15 July. ByteDance’s Doubao is disabling its agent feature on that date. Alibaba’s Qwen has already started pulling humanlike interactive agents and user-created agent functions from 10 July, with broader Qwen agent services going offline by 15 July. Two of China’s biggest AI consumer products, moving fast to comply before a deadline that’s landed without much fanfare outside China.
It’s worth getting to know these rules. They mark a regulatory shift that Western governments haven’t formalized yet – but they are definitely starting to circle.
What The Rules Cover
The scope is both specific and intentional: China’s new rules target AI services designed to sustain emotional interaction or mimic human personality, thought processes, and feelings. Ordinary customer service bots, knowledge assistants, work tools and research applications are explicitly excluded, provided they don’t involve sustained emotional engagement. The target is AI designed to feel like a person, not AI designed to be useful.
Under the measures, providers must avoid misleading users about the artificial nature of their service, add safety controls, protect user data and reduce the risk of addiction or psychological dependence. There’s a specific child protection dimension: virtual companion and romantic-partner type services for minors are banned. The official stance is that this isn’t about stopping AI chatbots, it’s about drawing a line around how humanlike they can be, and particularly around AI systems designed to maintain emotional attachment.
Products like Doubao and Qwen had allowed users to create customised agents with fixed personas, tones and roles, tutors, assistants, companions, personalities that could be shaped and sustained over time. That’s the specific capability being shut down. The boundary China is setting doesn’t focus on the technology itself, but on the shift from AI as a functional tool to AI as a substitute for human connection.
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Why This Is More Interesting Than It Looks
The significance of these rules lies less in their restrictiveness and more in their narrow, calculated precision.
Most AI regulation so far has focused on model safety, content moderation, copyright or disclosure requirements for AI-generated content. China has done something different here: it’s created a dedicated regime for AI identity presentation, specifically targeting the emotional and relational layer of AI interaction rather than the underlying model.
While a typical disclosure requirement merely mandates that users be alerted when they are interacting with AI, this regulation aims for something different. This rule goes further: don’t design AI to behave in ways that make the distinction feel irrelevant. The difference between a chatbot that says “I’m an AI” in its settings page and a chatbot that has been designed not to seem like one is exactly what these rules are trying to close.
Western regulators haven’t moved here yet, but the conversation is already happening. The EU’s AI Act has provisions around transparency and disclosure. The UK’s Online Safety Act touches on harmful interactions. Several US states have introduced bills requiring disclosure when AI is used in emotionally sensitive contexts. None of them have gone as far as China’s explicit prohibition on AI companion design. For regulators in those jurisdictions, it comes down to whether they want to, and whether a major consumer market moving in this direction creates pressure on others to follow.
What This Means For AI Product Builders
For founders and product teams building in the AI companion, AI agent or AI personality space, this is a practical development rather than an abstract regulatory concern. If you’re building a product with a sustained conversational persona, the Chinese market has now drawn an explicit line around what’s permissible. That’s relevant whether or not you’re currently operating there.
It’s also worth watching what happens to the users who built their workflows and emotional routines around products like Doubao’s agent features. The transition will tell regulators and product teams something about how embedded these interactions had become, and whether the dependency concern China cited was warranted. If the compliance deadline passes quietly, that’s one signal. If it doesn’t, that’s a more interesting one.
The broader trend is that AI regulation is getting more specific, not less. The first wave was about whether AI should be regulated at all. The second wave has been about model safety and content. This Chinese framework suggests a third wave is forming, one focused on the psychological and relational design of AI systems. Whether Western regulators follow that trajectory, or develop their own version of it, is the question worth paying attention to over the next 12 months.
