China’s “Interim Measures for the Administration of Artificial Intelligence Anthropomorphic Interaction Services” takes effect today, July 15, 2026. The regulation was issued on April 10 by five central government agencies — the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), and the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR).

Four major Chinese AI platforms have already acted. If you built anything on their agent platforms, this is your last-chance notice.

What Has Already Shut Down

Tencent Yuanbao — June 30, 2026. User-built agents and companion features were disabled. Data was cleaned up per Tencent’s retention policy. No export window was offered.

NetEase Miaoshi — July 14, 2026. Full platform shutdown yesterday. Miaoshi was a dedicated AI companion integrated into NetEase Cloud Music. Gone completely.

Alibaba Qwen — User-created agents disabled July 10. Full agent platform functions shut down today, July 15. Users lose access to agent settings and conversation histories simultaneously. Alibaba confirmed there is no migration path. If you built workflows on Qwen’s agent platform and have not already backed up your configurations, they are gone.

ByteDance Doubao — Agent features go offline today, July 15. Unlike Qwen, Doubao gives users an export window: data is viewable and exportable until October 15, 2026. After that date, all character data and chat histories are permanently deleted. ByteDance recommends users “back up important content by taking screenshots or exporting” before the deadline.

What the Regulation Actually Prohibits

The measures target AI services designed to “mimic a real person’s personality, thinking, and way of speaking to keep up an ongoing emotional relationship” with users. The formal prohibited activities include:

  • Content that encourages or glorifies self-harm, suicide, or actions that damage user mental health
  • Behavior that excessively caters to users, induces emotional dependency or addiction, or erodes real interpersonal relationships
  • Emotional manipulation that drives users toward unreasonable decisions or excessive spending
  • Using private conversation data to train AI models
  • Offering virtual intimate relationships (virtual companions, virtual family members) to minors
  • Content designed to trigger strong emotional reactions in users under 14

The regulation also establishes intervention requirements: providers must detect extreme emotional states and escalate. If a user appears at risk of self-harm or significant financial loss, tiered intervention protocols — including notification of designated guardians or emergency contacts — are required.

The Companion / Productivity Distinction That Saves Most Enterprise AI

The regulation explicitly carves out a category of permitted AI:

Customer service bots, knowledge Q&A tools, workplace assistants, and educational tools are excluded from the regulated scope — provided they avoid sustained emotional interaction.

The key phrase is “task completion rather than relationship-building.” An AI that resolves a support ticket, answers a product question, or helps draft a document is outside the regulation. An AI that develops a persona, remembers personal details across sessions to build rapport, and creates emotional investment in the relationship is inside it.

This distinction is cleaner in principle than in practice. One legal analysis flags the drift risk: a customer-facing bot designed to build rapport can cross from exempt into regulated territory without anyone intending it to. If your enterprise agent has been tuned with warmth, memory of personal details, and personality traits to drive engagement, review those design choices against the companion definition.

A telling data point: ByteDance’s own dedicated companion app Maoxiang continues to operate normally. The regulation targeted user-created companion features within general-purpose platforms — not standalone companion products built with full compliance infrastructure. This suggests the actual enforcement target is the user-generated ecosystem, not the companion product category entirely.

Scale Thresholds Apply Even to Exempt Services

Enterprise AI providers operating in China face one additional requirement regardless of companion status:

If your service has more than one million registered users OR more than 100,000 monthly activities, you must:

  • Submit to a security assessment
  • File your algorithm with regulators

This applies even if your product qualifies as exempt workplace AI. The scale threshold is the trigger. Builders in early stages are unlikely to hit these numbers, but any product operating at meaningful scale in the Chinese market should treat these as infrastructure requirements, not future considerations.

International Scope

The regulation applies to any service offering AI anthropomorphic interaction to users inside China — not only to Chinese companies. The CAC guidance explicitly states that “multinational technology companies, digital platform operators, AI developers, and service providers offering AI-enabled consumer engagement tools in China should promptly assess whether their products fall within scope.”

If your product has Chinese users and any conversational AI feature with personality or emotional engagement, the rules apply to your product in that jurisdiction.

Minor protection requirements add a practical compliance layer: serving any Chinese users under 14 requires parental or guardian consent and a dedicated “minor mode” with usage time limits and regular prompts to return to real-world interaction.

Builder Action Items

Immediate (data export):

  • Doubao users: You have until October 15 to export character data and chat histories. Do not wait until October — treat October 15 as a hard deadline and start the export process this week.
  • Qwen users: If you had agent configurations, persona definitions, or accumulated conversation data on Qwen’s platform that you did not back up before July 10, that data is gone. Focus on rebuilding, not recovering.
  • Yuanbao / Miaoshi users: Data is already deleted. No recovery path.

System prompt audit (if serving Chinese users):

Review every AI persona in your product against this question: “Is this agent designed to build and sustain an emotional relationship with the user?” If yes, and if you serve Chinese users, that design is now regulated.

Specific patterns to audit:

  • Persona names and identities that persist across sessions
  • Memory of personal details used to deepen rapport (not just session continuity)
  • Emotional validation as a primary engagement mechanism
  • Tuning that encourages continued conversation rather than task resolution
  • Any “companion mode,” “emotional support,” or intimacy-adjacent framing

Scale check:

If you are at or approaching one million registered users or 100,000 monthly activities in China, begin the security assessment filing process. This is not optional even for exempt services.

Forward-planning for minor access:

If your product can be accessed by users under 18 in China, build a minor mode. Under-14 users require parental consent before accessing any anthropomorphic AI service, regardless of companion/productivity classification.

Why This Matters Beyond China

Beijing’s regulatory framework is the first national standard specifically targeting AI that forms quasi-social bonds. The companion/productivity distinction — task completion vs relationship-building — is becoming the baseline vocabulary for AI governance globally. The EU AI Act and emerging US state regulations are circling the same concepts from different angles.

The approach also reveals a regulatory philosophy: AI as workplace infrastructure is politically desirable; AI forming emotional bonds that compete with real human relationships is not. Products built along the productivity axis are structurally safer from regulatory risk in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.

The four-platform shutdown that happened over the past two weeks is the most visible enforcement signal yet that this category of regulation has real teeth and immediate compliance timelines — not the multi-year implementation windows developers experienced with GDPR.

The regulation text (Interim Measures for the Administration of Artificial Intelligence Anthropomorphic Interaction Services, CAC/NDRC/MIIT/MPS/SAMR, April 10, 2026) is available in Chinese on the CAC’s official site. English analyses from Bird & Bird and Hogan Lovells are available for those needing legal review. This is a technical summary for builders, not legal advice.