“For companies where AI companionship isn’t a core business, it may simply make more commercial sense to remove these features than invest the resources needed to make them compliant.”
Beijing wrote rules about emotional dependence and ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent responded by deleting the companions outright. Compliance costs money. Deletion is free. The stated goal is protecting people from manipulation, and the result is a regulator deciding who millions of people are allowed to talk to. Users got no warning and no export.