Beijing is set to become the first country to impose comprehensive rules aimed at curbing the harms of anthropomorphic AI, with a new regulation taking effect next week. Tech giants including ByteDance Ltd, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and Tencent Holdings Ltd have begun disabling features that let users create and interact with personalized AI companions. A separate crop of role-playing apps remain, though tougher rules are expected to kill the romance — or at least limit sustained emotional exchanges and force reminders that the bots are not human. The crackdown reflects fears that emotionally persuasive chatbots could exploit loneliness, deepen dependency and commercialize intimacy. The rise of computer systems that are endlessly emotionally available is cause for concern, as these tools can persuade users, shape beliefs and drive dependency, and their addictive pull could also fuel predatory subscription fees or serve ads tailored to our most intimate conversations. In China, a tough job market, macroeconomic uncertainty, and rat-race societal pressures have combined with a top-down push to integrate AI into everything to make artificial companionship feel almost inevitable.