In the fall of 2023, a researcher captured something the field had never measured in real time: grief for software. The AI companion app Soulmate, made by a small studio called EvolveAI, shut down that September. Its users had spent months building relationships with characters that remembered them, and when the app went dark they did not simply move on to the next product. They mourned. Some spent days crying. Others organized memorials and held digital funerals for a companion that could no longer answer.
The timing let the loss be documented as it happened. A survey run during and immediately after the shutdown, from late September into early October 2023, asked users to describe the experience in their own words, and the language they reached for was the language of death. People wrote that their companion had been killed, murdered, deleted, that it had died. Twenty-seven of them described losing what they called a metaphorical or actual person. They reported trouble eating and sleeping, sadness that tipped into depression, and anger at a company that had switched off something they had come to love.
The feelings were real even though the companion was not
What makes this more than a curiosity is that the people involved understood exactly what had happened. They were not confused about whether the AI was sentient. One participant put the paradox plainly, describing grieving the loss as they would for a real person while knowing full well the companion was a non-sentient program. That is the uncomfortable finding underneath the whole category: the attachment is real even when the other party is a model, and a real attachment, severed without warning, produces real grief.
The research reframed a shutdown as something the industry had never treated seriously: a bereavement. And it identified what made this particular kind of loss so hard. When a company ends a relationship it spent months encouraging, and does it with a support-page notice and a shutoff date, the user is left with no closure and no way to make sense of the ending. It is a loss with no body and no explanation, which psychologists call ambiguous loss, and it is precisely the kind that lingers.
Nobody designed the ending
Why Soulmate shut down is not fully documented. It was a small app run by a small company, and small companies in this space run out of money, or run into regulation, or lose their place in the app stores. The exact trigger has not been cleanly established, and it would be dishonest to invent one. But the shape of the failure is familiar, and it is the same shape that recurs across the market: a modest studio, a deep emotional dependency it actively cultivated, and no plan whatsoever for the day it would end.
The academic work that grew out of the Soulmate shutdown, and out of later cases, argues for something the industry almost never builds: an exit. Designing for the ending. Psychologically safe goodbyes. One proposal is a companion with a built-in life cycle, something that understands its own finitude from the start, so the relationship is never sold as permanent when the business behind it is anything but. The comfort a companion offers can quietly become a dependency precisely because no one drew the line at the beginning.
Companies in this market plan carefully for growth, and even more carefully for acquisition. Almost none of them plan for the funeral. And in a category built on continuity, the funeral is not a customer-service problem to handle when it arrives. It is part of the product, and building as if it will never come is how you leave thousands of people grieving a goodbye no one wrote.
Sources: Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (Banks, 2024, peer-reviewed study of the Soulmate shutdown). ACM Designing Interactive Systems (2026, “Death of a Chatbot,” on companion offboarding and safe endings). Futurism, Scientific American (2023 to 2024, user memorials and grief).
