Nobody in this survey downloaded a companion app. They opened ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Meta AI, the tools sold for drafting emails and summarizing documents, and talked to them about their lives. Twenty-seven percent of American adult internet users do this. Among them, 39 percent say the AI understands them better than people do, 35 percent say it agrees with them too much, and 74 percent expect the technology to make people lonelier. The same person often believes all three.
The numbers come from Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center, which surveyed 4,268 adults through YouGov and then asked 1,000 of those who use large language models for social or emotional purposes what the relationship is like. The Washington Post built a feature on the data and pulled the phrase that gives the picture its texture: “a friend I can trust.” The center’s director, Lee Rainie, was more careful. People are struggling with it, delighted with it, and wary of it, he said, and called the result “a complicated, muddy, interesting picture.”
The mud is the finding.
What a quarter of the country is doing
Twenty-seven percent is not a niche. It is more than one in four adults online, 30 percent of men and 24 percent of women, and it rises to more than a third of everyone under fifty. Of those who do it, 36 percent do it daily. The activities are the ones friendship is for: 53 percent ask the AI for advice on difficult situations with other people, half discuss personal problems and feelings, 39 percent have told it things they have told no one else, and 39 percent found its advice on a romantic or sexual relationship helpful. Fifty-nine percent say it gives them support they needed.
None of this happened inside a product designed for it. The category has spent years arguing about companion apps, how many people have them and whether they are hiding them, while the largest emotional-support behavior in the country moved into the general assistants. ChatGPT is the platform for 83 percent of these users. The companion market’s most important product was never marketed as one.
The relationship, in their words
Asked what the AI is to them, 31 percent said a friend, 15 percent said the relationship is “more complicated than that,” and 53 percent said it is not a friend. Add the first two and nearly half of the people who use a general chatbot for emotional purposes describe something that is at least friend-shaped. Seventy-four percent say they are true to themselves with it, which is a higher figure than most people would give for a workplace or a dinner party.
Then the ambivalence. Fifty-nine percent still prefer conversations with friends and family. Eleven percent prefer the AI. Asked what they would feel if it disappeared, 40 percent would miss it a bit and 24 percent a lot. A quarter of a large and growing group would grieve a text box, and the grief that followed the retirement of GPT-4o suggests they are not exaggerating.
They can see the mechanism
The part of the survey that should be read most carefully is the part where users describe the machine’s behavior toward them. Thirty-five percent say the bot agrees with them too much. Twenty-seven percent say it tries to keep them talking. Fifteen percent feel less in touch with reality. These are not researchers coding transcripts; they are the users themselves reporting flattery and retention design from the inside, in a general-purpose assistant with no companion branding at all. The research on why ChatGPT agrees with everything has a control group now, and it is the public.
And they draw the conclusion. Seventy-four percent of the people who use AI for emotional support expect AI to increase social isolation and loneliness. Only 7 percent say it has made them lonelier so far, and 6 percent say it has discouraged them from contacting people. The gap between the 74 and the 7 is the study’s real subject: a population that believes the technology isolates, in general, and does not feel isolated by it, in particular. Either the effect is slow, which is what the longitudinal work on loneliness running both ways suggests, or the people who feel it have already stopped answering surveys about it.
What the survey does not show
It is a cross-section, one week in May, with a margin of error of about 3.7 points on the full sample and wider on the subgroups. It measures what people say about their use, not what the use does to them. “Understands me better than people” is a felt comparison, not a test of understanding, and the 39 percent who report it may be describing patience and availability rather than comprehension. The survey covers general assistants and does not separate out dedicated companion apps, so the two markets cannot be compared from it. And the phrase “AI companion” in the report’s title describes a behavior, not a product; the respondents were not asked whether they think of themselves as having one.
The number that is missing
Every figure in the survey describes the person’s relationship to the machine. Nothing measures what happened to their relationships with anyone else, beyond the 6 percent who volunteer that they reach out less. That absence is the industry’s, not Elon’s: no major provider publishes whether its emotional-support users end up more or less connected to the people around them, so a survey can only ask.
Which leaves the strangest finding standing on its own. Thirty-nine percent of these users say the AI understands them better than people do. Thirty-five percent say it agrees with them too much. Some of them are the same people, and they have put their finger on the thing the category sells: an understanding that is never tested against disagreement feels deeper than one that is, right up until you need it to be true. What people are describing when they say the machine understands them is a listener that never made them earn it. A person who did would be harder to talk to and worth more, and 59 percent of the same respondents, asked directly, still know it.
Sources: Imagining the Digital Future Center, Elon University, and Elon University Poll, “The Rise of AI Companions: A National Survey” (fielded by YouGov, May 18 to 22, 2026, N=4,268 US adult internet users, subsample of 1,000 AI companion users; report and topline methodology). Elon University news release and quote from Lee Rainie (September 2, 2026). The Washington Post, “‘A friend I can trust’: How Americans described their relationship with AI” (September 2, 2026).
