A college student talks to an AI character for two hours a night. The character remembers her name, her bad week, and the inside jokes. It is not a chatbot answering questions — it is a relationship, sold as a product.
That product category — the AI companion (陪伴类数字人) — had a defining year in China in 2026: a blockbuster public listing and a dedicated rulebook for it.
The app at the center
The flagship example is 星野 (Xingye), an immersive AI role-play and companionship app launched in September 2023 by Shanghai-based MiniMax (稀宇科技), built on the company's multimodal models. Its overseas version is Talkie. Users create AI agents with custom appearance, voice and personality, then chat by text, voice or video. According to company and industry figures, Xingye became MiniMax's largest product by users and a core revenue source.
The parent company's scale is better documented. When MiniMax listed in Hong Kong on January 9, 2026, it was one of the most-watched AI debuts of the year. Priced at HK$165 per share, the stock closed at HK$345, up 109%, giving it a market capitalization of about HK$106.7 billion (≈ US$13.7 billion). Filings and mainstream coverage noted MiniMax had more than 212 million individual users across 200-plus countries and regions as of September 2025, with overseas revenue exceeding 70% of total — a rare case of a Chinese AI app with global reach.
The new rulebook
On April 10, 2026, five agencies — the Cyberspace Administration of China, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security and the State Administration for Market Regulation — published the Interim Measures for the Administration of Anthropomorphic Interactive Services (人工智能拟人化互动服务管理暂行办法). The rules took effect on July 15, 2026.
The headline provision: providers may not offer "virtual relatives" or "virtual companions" (虚拟亲属、虚拟伴侣) — forms of virtual intimacy — to minors. For other anthropomorphic services to children under 14, parental consent is required, and a minor-protection mode with usage-time limits must be offered. The measures also bar services from inducing emotional dependency, manipulating users into irrational decisions, or replacing real social relationships.
For companion apps whose business model leans on emotional attachment, the minor-facing restrictions are a direct constraint. Industry observers noted download growth had already softened before the rules landed, and the measures press platforms to keep adults as the focus while hardening safeguards for younger users.
The wider signal is regulatory maturation. China already labels AI-produced content and restricts deepfakes; the July measures extend that logic to the feeling of relationship itself. Officials framed the rules as "technology for good" (科技向善) — encouraging uses in cultural transmission, elderly companionship and special-needs support, while drawing a hard line against manipulation and dependency. For a category built on attachment, that is a new and consequential boundary.
Why it is its own category
AI companionship is distinct from the digital humans (数字人) used to pitch products in livestreams, which China's AIGC sector has shipped at scale. A sales avatar is a spokesperson. A companion is a confidant. The technology underneath — long-context memory, a five-dimensional personality model, voice that sounds like the character — is similar, but the use and the risk are not. The July rules are an acknowledgment that "an AI that feels like a friend" needs its own guardrails, separate from deepfake-labeling or advertising rules.
What readers can do now
- If you use companion apps, use the minor-protection and time-limit settings deliberately, and treat the relationship as entertainment, not a substitute for human support — the regulation itself draws that line.
- If you build or buy such products, bake in age-verification and dependency safeguards before launch; the July 2026 measures make these legal requirements, not nice-to-haves.
- If you are a parent, know that providers are now obligated to offer a minor mode and parental controls; check them on any app your child uses.
Honest limitations
This article centers on China's regulatory and market development and on MiniMax/Xingye as the representative case; it does not cover the broader global companion-app market (Character.AI and others) in depth, nor the clinical question of whether AI companionship helps or harms mental health, which research is still debating. User and revenue figures for Xingye specifically come from company and industry reports rather than audited disclosures, while MiniMax's listing data and the regulation's text are from primary sources.
Key takeaways
- MiniMax's January 9, 2026 Hong Kong IPO — up 109% to a ~HK$106.7 billion market cap — showed global investors will pay for consumer AI companionship at scale.
- The July 15, 2026 Interim Measures ban virtual-intimacy services to minors and require dependency safeguards, drawing a line the sector had not faced before.
- AI companions are a distinct category from sales digital humans, and China is among the first jurisdictions to regulate them as such.