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

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.