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.
A different Psychology Today piece, and the more useful of the two.

The word illusion does a lot of work in this genre and I dislike most of it, because it assumes the person on the other side is doing the illusioning. Sometimes the illusion is entirely self-generated, and nobody at the other end is performing anything at all. That is the version nobody writes about, and it is the version a lot of people are living.
Notice, name, choose. That's the whole method.
The clerk's shelf - how this got here first

Sources
Psychology Today · 22 SEP 2026
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Proposed rules would bar AI companions from building emotional attachment with minors. Fines up to 6% of global revenue.
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Neuro-sama's 296k subs. She plays osu!, she sings, she thanks her creator on stream.