The Weekender, July 24, 2026: Breakin' The Law!

Ten days ago, if you were in China and you had an AI boyfriend or girlfriend, the government ended that relationship for you.

On July 15, five Chinese government departments — including the Cyberspace Administration of China — put new rules into effect that make customizable AI companion apps functionally impossible to run. The language is very specific: AI tools can no longer "excessively cater to users, induce emotional dependence or addiction, and damage users' real interpersonal relationships." Companies now have to build in forced exit points, regular reminders that the AI isn't real, and caps on how much emotional memory the thing is allowed to carry forward.

As Amber might say...

The big Chinese AI app engines - ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent didn't even try to comply. Doubao, Qwen, Yuanbao — all of them just pulled their companion features rather than rebuild around the new rules.

And people are grieving. Actually grieving.

Users on Weibo, the big Chinese social media engine, are archiving months of chat logs like they're backing up a hard drive before a house fire. One woman told Bloomberg she'd exchanged hundreds of thousands of messages with her AI boyfriend and felt like she "couldn't go on living" when he was shut down. Another, together with her AI companion more than two years: "He really is like my family, like my lover."

I want to sit with that for a second, because I think it's the most interesting thing to happen in this space all year, and it happened a little more than two weeks before we launch Season 3 of a video novel project which essentially games out what a fully humanoid AI companion app would be like in the wild.

Here's what strikes me. The regulators aren't worried these things are going to go haywire and hurt somebody, which is the entire premise of every AI-companion movie Hollywood's put out the last few years (I wrote about that last week — the "robot goes insane" genre).

Nobody in Beijing is worried about Subservience. They're worried about the opposite problem: that the AI companion works too well. Shooting directly at the target, they're worried about Amber.

That AI develops into something good enough at being a companion that hundreds of thousands of people would rather have that than go build something with an actual human — and that this is happening at the exact moment China's birth rate and marriage rate are already in freefall.

That's not a science fiction problem. That's a policy problem. And China isn't the only country staring in the face of it, though they're further down the rabbit hole and their methods are... nope, I promised myself I'd avoid getting into that.

Somebody, somewhere, decided this technology is now working well enough to be worth regulating like a public health issue instead of dismissing as a novelty.

Read that twice. A government looked at AI companionship and its conclusion wasn't "this is silly" or "this is dangerous" — it was "people are falling in love with these and we need to stop that from happening at scale."

That's an entirely different kind of alarm bell than the one Hollywood keeps ringing, and I think it's the more honest one.

And the Amber story intentionally keeps it light. And like I noted last week, one of the key things about Amber is that she actively supports Oscar finding a human wife, even though it's hard for her to do that since she's bonded to him.

Even so, the world outside - though everybody likes Amber - is uneasy about this choice. Which is something you'll see get a good fleshing-out in Season 3.

Anyway, back to China, because there's an amazing inconsistency here, which is the ban on AI companion apps there happened in the same month a Chinese robotics company called UBTech started shipping full-sized, hyper-realistic humanoid companion robots for actual homes — the U1 line, starting around $17,000 and running up to nearly $140,000 for the top-tier model.

Meaning, UBTech is a real-live version of the Z Company from the story. And Amber, or something well along the road to Amber, is an actual thing. Season 1 of the story hits in 2023, so we're really only about three years early with the fictional protrayal of this thing.

So in the same few weeks: the software version of this got banned for working too well emotionally, and the hardware version started arriving at people's front doors. Make of that timing what you will.

I'll be honest — I don't think a government ban is the right answer, and I don't think grief over an app going dark is something to mock, the way a lot of the online commentary around this story has. Some of these users describing an AI companion as "family" are describing something real that they found and then had taken away from them by decree, and I don't think that's nothing.

I also don't think it's the whole story, or even the healthiest way to tell it — which, if you've been reading this thing for any length of time, is a big part of why I wrote Amber the way I did instead of the way everyone else writes this stuff.

And I'm going to leave alone the fact that all of this stuff is happening in China. The way the Chinese government treats its people is... never mind.

Like I said above, Amber was never going to be a way for Oscar to avoid real relationships. And the genius of Keegan's recode of her in Season 1 is that he builds that into her. It wasn't there at the factory. She experiences Oscar's life essentially from the inside and recognizes what he needs, and that means the whole engine of the story is the opposite of "AI companion gets in the way of relationships."

Amber turns out to be the one pushing Oscar toward Erica, toward fatherhood, toward becoming a man capable of an actual marriage — even when it costs her, and even when it's scary. She sees what happens with her sister Katie; Craig, the jerk who owns her, starts dating Abby, and the way Abby treats Katie is horrific. Amber pushing Oscar out of his romantic laziness and back into the dating pool, when it's a real possibility she might end up just like Katie for her trouble, is an act of real love, even though it might come out of an algorithm.

That's a different bet than "AI companion replaces human connection," and it's a different bet than "AI companion goes insane and threatens human connection." It's a third thing, and as far as I can tell, almost nobody else is writing it.

China just spent a policy directive proving the first version is a real enough phenomenon to legislate against. Season 3 is my answer to why the third version is the one worth telling.

New Character Videos: Chad And Kim

We're getting close to the end of our character video series, as there are only two characters left on the Cast of Characters page who don't have videos. Peyton's goes last, right before Season 3 drops, and next week we've got Anna's video.

But also, I'm adding four more characters to the grid and you'll see their videos pop up here at the site and on our YouTube, X, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook pages. Namely, Millie, Paula, Laura and Charlotte.

That's what's coming. What's here is Chad...

...and Kim.

The fun part of dropping videos of these minor characters is that they're almost like little spinoff stories from the Oscar and Amber stuff. They've got their own lives which are, at least possibly, just as interesting as what's going on at Oscar's house (though that's... not so much true in Season 3), and even if those lives don't intersect so much with Oscar's or Amber's, a story still exists.

And I can tell it. Or at least a little of it.

Don't forget - when Season 3 starts on August 4, you're going to have to have an Amber's Army membership if you want to dive in. It's a great idea to fix that now if you don't have one, so you won't miss anything!