On: 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.