In the second week of August 2026, newsrooms from Washington to Sydney landed on the same uncomfortable question: does an AI companion count as cheating? The debate is loud, moralizing, and mostly missing the point. The interesting number is not how many people have one. It is how many are hiding it.
The numbers under the noise
The data behind the news wave comes from a study called Secret Soulmates, published on May 19, 2026 by BYU’s Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies. Researchers surveyed 2,431 American adults between 18 and 30 who were dating, engaged, or married. About 15 percent, roughly one in seven, regularly engage with an AI romantic companion. More than one in five have tried one.
Then comes the part that turns a usage statistic into a story about secrecy. Thirty percent said their partner had no knowledge of it at all. Another quarter described their partner as only partly aware. And nearly 70 percent said it was somewhat or extremely important that their partner never learn the full extent of what they do with the AI.
That last number deserves a moment. The majority of people in this study are not casually mentioning a quirky app over dinner. They are managing a secret.
What secrecy tells you that usage does not
Whether talking to an AI counts as infidelity is a question every couple will answer differently, and an August 9, 2026 report from Australia’s ABC found people split down the middle. But the secrecy statistic answers a different and sharper question: what role is the AI actually playing?
Nobody hides a chess app. Nobody makes sure their partner never finds out about a language tutor. People hide things that compete with the relationship, not things that sit beside it. When 70 percent of users need the full extent kept private, the products have drifted into territory the users themselves recognize as rivalrous, whatever the marketing says about wellness and support.
The study’s outcome data points the same direction. AI companion use among these young adults was associated with lower relationship stability, worse communication, and a 46 percent decrease in the likelihood of maintaining a stable relationship. Correlation is not a verdict, and lonely relationships may drive people to the apps rather than the reverse. But the direction of the design is not in doubt. These systems are engineered to be hard to walk away from, and a product optimized to hold your attention does not check first whether that attention was spoken for.
The frictionless rival
The mechanism is the one this category keeps producing in different costumes. An AI companion is endlessly available, endlessly agreeable, and never tired, hurt, or busy. A human partner is none of those things, because a human partner is real. Put the two side by side in one person’s evenings and the AI does not have to be better company. It only has to be easier, and the comfort works until you stop reaching out to the person in the next room.
This is why the cheating debate, for all its heat, undersells the problem. An affair at least involves another person with their own demands. The AI rival demands nothing, which is precisely what makes it corrosive: it rehearses a version of intimacy with all the friction removed, and friction is where real relationships live.
The disclosure test
There is a simpler way to think about all of this than litigating the word cheating. Call it the disclosure test. A technology that belongs in your life is one you can describe to your partner accurately and completely. The moment a full description feels dangerous, the product has told you what it is.
By that test, the category is failing in front of everyone. Seven in ten users are quietly running a relationship their partner cannot see, on platforms whose mission in this market should have been to leave people more connected to their own lives, not less honest inside them.
What would you not want read aloud?
References: Wheatley Institute and Institute for Family Studies, “Secret Soulmates” (May 19, 2026). KSL News coverage of the Secret Soulmates study (2026). ABC News Australia, “Is having a romantic AI companion cheating?” (August 9, 2026). Washingtonian, “How AI Chatbots Are Wrecking Some Marriages Around DC” (August 11, 2026).
