Ten days before Beijing's rules on humanlike AI take effect, ByteDance and Alibaba are pulling the personalized agent features out of Doubao and Qwen.
ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen are shutting down their personalized AI agent features on July 15, the same day China's first rules governing humanlike AI interaction take effect. Users who built custom companions, virtual assistants with persistent memory, their own names and their own personalities, have until then to save what they can. After that, according to Global Times, ByteDance will keep Doubao users' agent data in a read-only state until October 15, and then it disappears for good. Alibaba hasn't said what happens to Qwen users' agents at all.
The rule forcing the shutdown is the Interim Measures for the Administration of Anthropomorphic AI Interaction Services, issued in April by the Cyberspace Administration of China alongside four other agencies, including the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. It's the first regulation in China written specifically for AI that imitates human personality and emotional connection, and it takes direct aim at the kind of product Doubao and Qwen built.
The measures require anti-addiction systems, identity checks for users under 14, and an always-available exit option. Anyone who talks with one of these AI companions for more than two consecutive hours has to be interrupted with a reminder that they're talking to a machine, not a person. Services reaching minors need a dedicated mode with time limits and parental controls, and virtual companion or family-style relationships are barred for anyone under 18 entirely.
That's a hard requirement to design around. A product built to remember your name, your mood and your last three conversations, and to keep you coming back, doesn't easily coexist with a rule demanding it break the spell every two hours.
ByteDance has told Doubao users to screenshot or export anything they want to keep before July 15. Chat histories and agent configurations will still be viewable, but only in read-only mode, until October 15. After that, per Global Times, the company says the data will be handled under its standard privacy policy and won't be recoverable inside the app. Alibaba has offered no such window for Qwen. The company is retiring its personalized agent feature on the same date but hasn't published a data retention plan, leaving users with less notice than ByteDance gave its own.
This isn't only a Doubao and Qwen problem. The Interim Measures apply to any anthropomorphic AI service operating in China, and Beijing has flagged AI companion products more broadly over the past year as a source of addiction risk, psychological manipulation and eroded trust in real relationships. Those are the same concerns behind the lawsuits filed against Character.AI and Replika in American courts, after reports linked chatbot use to self-harm among teenage users. Beijing appears to be moving to head off a similar reckoning before it happens domestically, rather than reacting to one after the fact.
On Weibo, the reaction split along a familiar line. Some users mourned losing a companion they'd built over months of daily conversation. Others read the shutdown as a pragmatic call by ByteDance and Alibaba, since rebuilding an agent architecture that satisfies the new rules would cost far more than pulling the feature now and doing it properly later.
Neither company has said whether or when a compliant version of the agent feature might return. Given the scale of what the rules demand, that's not a small rebuild. Whoever manages to ship an anthropomorphic AI product that actually satisfies Beijing's new playbook first will end up writing the template the rest of the industry follows, in China and probably well beyond it.
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