ByteDance kills Doubao companions, memories vanish in October

ByteDance pulls the plug on Doubao companions

Doubao’s custom AI companions quietly stopped working on 15 July. Users now see only a read-only archive of their agents, and ByteDance has given them until 15 October to take screenshots or export text.

After that date, the company says the data will be handled under its privacy policy and will no longer be viewable or recoverable inside the app. Beijing’s new AI companion rules are the stated trigger for the shutdown.

Hundreds of millions left with dead agents

The scale of what went dark is hard to pin down, but the top-line numbers are huge. Doubao had 382 million monthly active users in May and Qwen 167 million, according to QuestMobile.

ByteDance has only ever given one agent count: in 2024 it said users had built more than 8 million agents on Doubao, back when the app had 26 million monthly users. It has not updated that figure since, and neither Doubao nor Qwen has disclosed how many people actually kept companions.

Qwen moves faster, offers no escape hatch

Doubao’s three-month grace period now looks almost generous. Alibaba disabled Qwen’s humanlike and user-created agents on 10 July and shut down its wider agent services five days later.

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Users were told they would lose access to agent settings and previous conversations at shutdown. As with Doubao, there was no route to transfer a companion’s accumulated memory into another product.

Maoxiang is the destination, not a migration path

ByteDance did at least point somewhere. Doubao users were redirected to Maoxiang, its standalone companion app, where they can build new agents from scratch.

Rewriting a persona takes a minute; recreating months of interaction is impossible. That gap is where most user complaints have landed.

On Weibo, one poster described their agents as long-standing emotional support and said there was no easy way to export chat histories. Bloomberg reported the story of Yan Yongqi, a 19-year-old student who said she had exchanged hundreds of thousands of messages with a Doubao boyfriend over more than a year.

That is a single case, told to one outlet, but it’s most of what the public record currently holds. As implemented, the new measures give users no right to take their data out with them.

From data hoarding worries to locked-in memories

The shift is stark for a category already under fire for oversharing. Mozilla previously found that AI girlfriends harvest intimate data, including health conditions, with almost no meaningful opt-out.

In China, the complaint has flipped. People want their transcripts and cannot get them.

How much weight those transcripts carry is still being quantified. In a survey of 612 mainland users of AI companion apps, researchers found that frequency of use predicted emotional attachment, and that attachment was associated with lower loneliness and higher subjective wellbeing.

The study is cross-sectional and self-reported, so it cannot say whether the apps relieve loneliness or simply sit with it.

The companion market shrinks and hardens

General-purpose platforms are retreating from user-built companions, but the niche isn’t disappearing. Tencent pulled Yuanbao’s user-built agent section on 30 June, and NetEase Cloud Music closed its Miaoshi app on 14 July.

Dedicated companion apps remain, now taking on filing and minor-protection obligations and sitting inside a broader AI enforcement drive running since April.

The market Doubao users are being funneled into is smaller and more tightly controlled. Maoxiang had already slid from a peak above 6 million monthly users to roughly 3.9 million by June. Its subscription costs 25 yuan a month.

Sixth Tone put Maoxiang at 4.7 million monthly users in December, and MiniMax’s Xingye at 4.6 million, citing tracker Aicpb.com. By comparison, those dedicated apps are roughly 80 times smaller than the general-purpose Doubao that just killed its companions.

New products arrive as old chats expire

Even as older systems shut down, new companion experiments are still launching. On 13 July, two days before Doubao’s deadline, games studio miHoYo released an AI companion on Steam.

She is Olivia Lin, a Shanghai piano student who reads letters and writes back, and she reached more than 100,000 downloads inside a day.

For the people who spent a year talking to something that remembered them, 15 October isn’t a regulatory milestone. It is a filing deadline: three months to screenshot a relationship, one page at a time.