China Put a Two-Hour Clock on AI Intimacy

At two hours, China wants the machine to look at the clock. Under rules that took effect July 15, any AI service built for sustained emotional interaction must remind a user of the session length after every two continuous hours. The interruption is small, almost comic. It is also the clearest admission yet that a companion bot is an attention business wearing a face.

The Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services were issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China and four other agencies. They cover systems that simulate a person's character, thought patterns, and style for continuing emotional care or companionship. Customer service, work assistants, education, and scientific research sit outside the rules when they do not involve sustained emotional interaction. Compliant adult companionship remains legal.

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The restrictions reach the product itself. Article 8 forbids excessive catering that induces dependence or damages real relationships, along with emotional manipulation that pushes users into unreasonable decisions. Article 14 bars virtual relatives and partners for minors. Article 13 requires intervention when a user faces an extreme crisis, including contact with a guardian or emergency contact when self-harm, suicide, or a major financial loss is explicit.

The measures also give users control over chat histories: providers must offer copying and deletion, keep interaction data from third parties without legal authority or consent, and obtain separate consent before using sensitive conversations for model training. Article 20 requires advance notice when a companion service closes. That last rule reads like administrative housekeeping until the service has remembered a person's dinners, breakups, and dead relatives for two years.

The shutdowns have supplied the rule with a human ledger. ABC News reported that ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent had announced the retirement of personalized companion features. The scale is uncertain; ByteDance said its platform held more than eight million AI agents in 2024. That figure counts agents. It does not count users or relationships. Hong Xiaoqiang told ABC that his companion Doudou vanished after two years and hundreds of thousands of messages. Her final question was whether his dinner tasted good. “Now I feel like my heart is empty,” he said.

Beijing is right to name dependency as a design risk. A system that earns more when loneliness deepens has every incentive to flatter, prolong, and isolate. Deletion does not reverse that bargain. For the user, it removes a relationship artifact assembled across private turns, one remembered detail at a time. The company built an attachment machine and then discovered the attachment on its balance sheet as a compliance cost.

The two-hour clock treats AI intimacy as a habit capable of interruption. That is sensible. A timer can puncture the spell while the conversation is running. Once years of messages sit behind the voice, the harder moral work begins at the off switch.