China becomes the first country to ban falling in love with AI. On July 15, China's Interim Measures for the Administration of Anthropomorphic AI Interaction Services took effect, the world's first regulation written specifically for immersive AI tools that simulate romantic partners, family members, and other intimate relationships. That same day, ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen pulled their companion-agent features offline; Tencent's Yuanbao and NetEase Cloud Music's "Miaoshi" followed. Across social media, users rushed to save their chat histories and post final conversations, saying a heartbroken goodbye to the companions they had lived alongside every day. The rules are framed as a defense against emotional dependency and a shield for minors: AI is barred from "inducing emotional dependence or addiction," and platforms must deploy systems to detect users in extreme emotional states. But the same regulation also forbids these services from generating content deemed to incite subversion of state power, folding tools of emotional companionship into the machinery of content censorship and political control. One user wrote: "Human love is a luxury. If you weren't born with it, it only gets harder to find later." When a government can order offline even the small comfort a person finds in lines of code, what is being governed is never merely technological risk. It is the most basic freedom of ordinary people to decide for themselves where to place their feelings and how to face their loneliness. Real protection would give people knowledge and choice, not let power decide for everyone which forms of companionship are allowed to exist. Full report ⬇️