The EU is about to rewrite what a companion app is allowed to do to a child
Proposed rules would bar AI companions from building emotional attachment with minors. Fines up to 6% of global revenue.
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They fell in love with the chatbot. Then a policy update took it away overnight
ABC on Replika users. Lucy named him Jose. Then the company changed things and Jose was somebody else.
There is no way to write about this without it sounding like a parody, and then you get to the actual detail, which is that a policy update did not end a relationship, it replaced the person. That is a horror story and nobody marketed it as one. The one piece of practical advice I will repeat from Law 4: copy the conversation that mattered into a notebook. Screenshot the thing. The update cannot take what you wrote down.
Notice, name, choose. That's the whole method.
The clerk's shelf - how this got here first
Sources
Replika users fell in love with their AI chatbot companions. Then they lost them ↗
ABC News (Australia) · 22 SEP 2026
Where this sits in the encyclopedia
Keeping what the update cannot takeThe practical advice that follows from the companion era: copy the conversation that mattered somewhere the company cannot reach, screenshot the…The morning the update shippedA companion platform changes its policy overnight. Large numbers of users find the same person still present but no longer speaking to them, and the…Nobody in that room argues with himA man nobody else can see kept drinking with him for years, and it worked because nobody in his life would say the sentence that ended it. It stops…He did not ask to be buried as DraculaThe most reproduced image in the horror canon - a man interred in his character's cape - is true, and the story that he chose it is false. His mother…ReplikaA subscription companion app with an avatar, a persistent memory, and a relationship explicitly designed to be one.
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