About one in five American adults has used an AI system to seek a romantic connection, and among young adults the figures climb steeply: roughly one in three young men and one in four young women, according to the Institute for Family Studies. Among 18-to-30-year-olds, a 2026 BYU study found 15 percent maintaining a regular relationship with a romantic AI. Those are the most defensible numbers in circulation, and every one of them comes with a definitional catch worth understanding before quoting any of them, because “having an AI girlfriend” turns out to be several different behaviors wearing one name.
The headline numbers
Start with what large, methodologically serious surveys actually found. The Institute for Family Studies, polling US adults in 2025, reported that close to 20 percent had used AI romantically in some form, from flirtatious chat with a general-purpose assistant to a dedicated companion app. Concentration by age is dramatic: about a third of men aged 18 to 30, and about a quarter of women the same age.
The BYU Wheatley Institute’s “Secret Soulmates” survey of 2,431 US adults aged 18 to 30, published in May 2026, sharpened the picture: 15 percent reported regular ongoing use of a romantic AI. Its most quoted finding is about who knows: nearly a third of partnered users said their partner was unaware, and around 70 percent did not want the full extent known. The secrecy runs deeper on one side of the gender line, a pattern examined in the women who have AI boyfriends and hide them better.
Teenagers change the denominator
Among adolescents the phenomenon stops being a niche. Common Sense Media’s national survey found 72 percent of US teens have used an AI companion in some form, with about a third finding the conversations as satisfying as talking to a real friend, a result unpacked in the study on teens who find AI as satisfying as friendship. In the UK, Male Allies UK’s survey of 1,032 boys aged 12 to 16 found one in five knows someone who is dating an AI, a proximity statistic that says as much as any usage figure: for this cohort, the AI girlfriend is not a rumor from the internet. It is someone in the friend group. Why boys in particular reach for it is its own story, told in the survey where 72 percent of boys said no one really knew them.
What counts as “having” one
Now the catch. The gap between one in five adults and the millions actually subscribed to girlfriend apps is enormous, and it is where most bad statistics in this territory are born. At least four behaviors get collapsed into the phrase: ever having flirted with a chatbot, periodically using a companion app, maintaining one ongoing named relationship, and paying for it. Each ring of that circle is a fraction of the one outside it. Ever-used sits near 20 percent of adults. Regular romantic use among young adults, 15 percent. Ongoing committed-style relationships, smaller still, and paid subscriptions smaller again, concentrated in the category’s roughly 120 million dollars of US annual consumer spending.
Time tells the same story from another angle: Americans now spend about 705 million hours a quarter with AI companions, more than twice the time spent on dating apps, a gap dissected in the comparison of AI companion time and dating app time. Hours concentrate hardest among the smallest, most committed ring. The average is not the story; the distribution is.
Why every number is probably an undercount
Every figure above is self-reported, and this is a behavior people demonstrably conceal. The BYU data shows most users hiding the extent of use from the person closest to them; the odds they are more candid with a survey are not good. Add the definitional blur, the speed of adoption, and the fact that general-purpose chatbots now absorb romantic use that no companion-app metric captures, and the true numbers are at least what the surveys say, almost certainly higher, and rising on every measured axis.
So, how many people have AI girlfriends? Ever tried: one in five adults. Young and regular: one in six or seven. Teen-adjacent: a majority have at least touched the category. And the most important number is the direction, every serious measurement since 2024 points the same way, up. The numbers as they continue to move are tracked across the Stay Social journal.
Sources: Institute for Family Studies, US adult survey on romantic AI use (2025). BYU Wheatley Institute and Institute for Family Studies, “Secret Soulmates” (May 2026, N=2,431). Common Sense Media, “Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs” (July 2025, N=1,060). Male Allies UK, “Voice of the Boys” (October 2025, N=1,032). Appfigures via TechCrunch, US companion-app consumer spending (2025). Sensor Tower, State of AI report (2026).
