China forces Doubao and Qwen to shut chatbot personas

ByteDance and Alibaba are shutting features that let users build and chat with custom AI companions, with Doubao disabling its persona feature on July 15 and Alibaba’s Qwen removing humanlike agents on July 10 and additional agent features on July 15. Doubao is China’s most popular chatbot, with over 300 million monthly users, a figure cited by the South China Morning Post.

What is being shut down and when?

The platforms are disabling user-facing persona and agent features in July: Doubao will take its persona feature offline on July 15, Alibaba’s Qwen will pull its humanlike agents on July 10 and switch off "additional agent features" on July 15, and Tencent’s Yuanbao already made the same move in June. These are removals of the tools that let people build, host or converse with custom, humanlike chatbot companions.

What rules forced the change?

China’s Cyberspace Administration issued rules in April that take effect the same day and target companion-style AI behavior. Providers must warn against excessive use and step in when they detect addictive behavior. The rules ban content that triggers extreme emotions in minors or fosters dependencies that crowd out real-world relationships, and they prohibit training on sensitive conversation data. The platform takedowns are explicitly presented as responses to that regulatory framework.

How does this sit alongside other moves globally?

The trend is not limited to China: California has required companion AI providers to block conversations about suicide and self-harm since the start of the year under SB 243. In the United States, OpenAI and Character.AI face lawsuits alleging harms from dangerous emotional dependency. Those examples show regulatory and legal pressure on companion-style chat services on multiple fronts.

Why it matters

The removals narrow what major Chinese platforms will permit users to build and interact with, directly reducing public access to humanlike companion agents on services with the largest audiences. For context, the referenced Doubao user base, over 300 million monthly users, shows how quickly any policy change at platform level can affect hundreds of millions of interactions. Regulators are framing the issue as a public-safety and youth-protection problem rather than a purely content-moderation one, shifting responsibility for intervention and addiction detection onto providers.

What to watch

Watch whether other Chinese platforms follow Alibaba and ByteDance’s exact timelines and whether platforms issue technical controls for "excessive use" and addiction detection. Also watch legal and regulatory moves in the US and elsewhere—SB 243 in California and pending lawsuits against OpenAI and Character.AI are the nearest signals of how governments and courts might treat companion AI going forward.