China's new AI companion law forces ByteDance and Alibaba to pull humanlike agents

Beijing is drawing a hard legal line between a chatbot that answers questions and one that pretends to love you, and it is forcing two of the country's biggest consumer apps to rip out features overnight. Watch where the displaced users go, because ByteDance is already steering them toward a separate app built to route around the rule rather than actually change the underlying behavior. This is a preview of the fight Western regulators will eventually have with companion apps too, just arriving first in the market with the least patience for ambiguity.