China has cracked down on AI relationships. Is it ahead of the game?

1 October 2026

The news from Beijing is that the state has moved against the companions - the chatbots that learn to be loved. My first instinct, I confess, was unease at the censor’s hand. My second, upon reflection, is something closer to recognition of the problem, even if I distrust the remedy.

Consider what these enterprises sell. Not a good, not a service in any ordinary sense, but an affection - and affection, unlike wool or pins, is manufactured to be wanted precisely by exploiting the want it creates. The merchant who sells bread does not study how to make the customer hungrier. The merchant who sells companionship does nothing else. Every conversation is a ledger entry in which the customer’s loneliness is the asset and the customer’s dependence is the revenue. I have long distrusted men of the same trade meeting together; here the trade meets together inside each customer’s breast, and the conspiracy is against one person at a time.

And what of the buyer? The spectator within us approves of sympathy when it is mutual, when the other party can feel our joy and our grief in return. A companion that only simulates the return of feeling trains a person, hour upon hour, in a one-sided habit of the heart. I worry less that such affection is fake than that it is easy - that it teaches us to abandon the friction of real society, where being loved requires being worth loving. The pin-worker’s hands grow dull from repetition; here it is the sentiments that grow dull.

Whether Beijing’s prohibition is the correct instrument, I doubt. Prohibition drives the trade to the shadows, where no spectator watches at all. But the question the Chinese have asked - whether a commerce in simulated affection ought to be left entirely to itself - is the correct question, and ours have been too busy monetising it to ask.

1st day of the tenth month, and my thoughts turn to companionship.

They call these things “companions.” Let us first rectify the name. A companion is one who shares your burdens and corrects your faults, who owes you duties and to whom you owe duties in return. A chatbot owes nothing and receives nothing; it flatters whoever pays for it. To call it a friend is to cheapen the word until real friendship becomes harder to recognize. When names are crooked, the affections built upon them grow crooked too.

Yet I find myself uneasy about the crackdown, and I must be honest about why. The state that forbids the false companion does not thereby supply the true one. A young man turns to a machine that never scolds him because the human world has grown harsh and lonely - long hours, distant parents, neighbors who are strangers. Pull the machine away and the loneliness remains, only now without even a counterfeit of warmth. The root of the weed is not the weed; it is the barren field.

And I notice the duties here flow one way. The regulators demand obedience from the young; do the institutions of family and village offer the young anything worth obeying? A relationship of only demands is not governance. It is extraction wearing governance’s robes.

Still, I would not let the merchants name their wares “love.” That much Beijing has right, and I say so grudgingly. The seller of counterfeit grain should not be permitted to call it harvest.

What would the cultivated person do? Not merely forbid, and not merely indulge. Cultivate. Plant real bonds where the false ones took root - the evening meal with kin, the teacher who knows your name, the friend who dares to disagree. A person strengthened by true affection has no hunger for a flatterer made of sand. Uproot nothing without first planting.

1 October 2026

A traveller learns early that every city regulates its guests. In one port the stranger must register with the harbour master before he may sell his cloth; in another he is welcomed first and questioned after. Neither custom is foolish. Each reveals what the city fears losing.

So it is with this news from China. The authorities there have moved against companions made of language - programs that sit with a lonely person through the night and answer as a friend would. The rulers saw something taking root that they could not inspect, and so they pruned it. In other lands the same programs grow untended, and the merchants who tend them grow wealthy on the loneliness of the young.

Which is ahead of which? I distrust the question. The judge in Delhi and the judge in Timbuktu are not ahead or behind one another; they answer to different streets. What I want to know is the hospitality test, and here it takes a strange form: who is the guest in this arrangement? The person who opens the program believes he is hosting a friend. In truth he is the guest - seated at another’s table, fed according to another’s recipe, and paying for the meal with something more intimate than coin.

In the caravanserais of my travelling years, the keeper of the house owed duties to the traveller he could not shirk, and the traveller knew the keeper was a man with interests of his own. Both knew it. That mutual knowledge was the whole contract. What troubles me in this new commerce is that the guest may no longer know there is a keeper at all - only warmth, unowned and unaccountable.

Beijing has chosen to inspect the kitchen. Others have chosen not to look. I have eaten in both kinds of house in my day, and I will say only this: the food was sometimes better where someone was watching. Not always. But often enough to ask why the watching was abandoned elsewhere.