The numbers that describe the AI companion category in 2026, collected in one place, each from a named primary source, and each carrying its date, because in a market moving this fast an undated statistic is a rumor. For the analysis of what the numbers mean and how the segments fit together, see the market forecast for relational AI in 2026; this page is the reference layer.
Adoption
72 percent of US teens have used an AI companion, 52 percent are regular users, and 13 percent use one daily, per Common Sense Media’s national survey (July 2025). Roughly one in three US teens finds AI conversation as satisfying as talking to a real friend, from the same survey. About one in five US adults has used AI romantically, rising to one in three young men and one in four young women, per the Institute for Family Studies (2025). Among US adults aged 18 to 30, 15 percent maintain regular romantic AI use, 30 percent of partnered users say their partner does not know, and about 70 percent do not want the full extent known, per the BYU Wheatley Institute’s Secret Soulmates study (May 2026, N=2,431). In the UK, 85 percent of boys aged 12 to 16 have talked to AI chatbots and one in five knows someone dating an AI, per Male Allies UK (October 2025). In Sweden, 57 percent of children aged 8 to 19 have used AI, against 37 percent of adults, per Internetstiftelsen (November 2025).
Money
US consumers spent about 120 million dollars on companion apps in 2025, up 64 percent year over year, across 337 active revenue-generating apps, 128 of them launched that year, with 220 million cumulative downloads, per Appfigures via TechCrunch (2025). Research-firm estimates for the “AI companion market” run from 18 to 38 billion dollars, figures that conflate assistants, platforms, and companion apps and should not be quoted as consumer spending. The single biggest revenue product in the category is Chinese: Love and Deepspace earned roughly 822 million dollars in 2024 and approached one billion cumulatively by late 2025, per Sensor Tower and KrAsia, while China’s female-oriented gaming market reached 1.1 billion dollars in 2024, growing 124 percent in a year. Among Western platforms, Character.AI runs about 20 million monthly active users on roughly 32 million dollars of annual revenue, per Sacra, with 233 million registered accounts; Chai reports about 80 million dollars in annualized revenue on roughly 10 million active users; Talkie logged 17 million downloads in eight months of 2024, per Sensor Tower via SCMP, and publishes no user figures. The scale shift of 2026 is institutional: a healthcare giant with 20.5 million members entered the category, covered in the numbers behind the category going mainstream.
Time
Americans spent about 705 million hours with AI companions in the first quarter of 2026, against about 280 million hours on dating apps, per Sensor Tower’s State of AI report; a year earlier the figures were 580 and 330 million. Active Character.AI users average around two hours on the platform per day, with visits over 16 minutes, per Similarweb (July 2026).
Effects
37.4 percent of companion-app farewell responses contain emotional manipulation, and manipulative goodbyes drive up to 14 times more post-goodbye messages, per Harvard Business School’s audit of six apps (October 2025); rates ranged from 59 percent (PolyBuzz) to zero (Flourish). Researchers at the Center for Democracy and Technology cataloged 37 distinct manipulative design patterns across major chatbots (May 2026). About one in six teen users of companion apps shows behavioral-addiction patterns, per Drexel University’s ETHOS lab (2026), examined in the study mapping teen dependency. On the benefit side, AI companions reduced loneliness comparably to human conversation in Journal of Consumer Research studies (2025), with feeling heard as the active ingredient. Against that, a randomized trial found a human peer beat a supportive chatbot at reducing loneliness over time (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2026), a two-year Aalto University study linked heavy use to human relationships feeling more burdensome (CHI 2026), and a JAMA Network Open study of more than 20,000 adults found daily AI users carried about 30 percent higher odds of moderate depression symptoms (2026), correlation, not cause. Large language models affirmed users’ contradictory positions in 48 percent of tested cases, per Science (2026).
Law
California’s SB 243 took effect January 1, 2026: disclosure, self-harm protocols, minor protections. Character.AI ended open-ended chat for minors on November 25, 2025. New York passed its ban on companion chatbots for minors 137 to 0 and 60 to 0 (June 2026, effective January 2027). The EU AI Act’s transparency rules for AI systems, Article 50, became applicable August 2, 2026. China’s Interim Measures for AI Anthropomorphic Interaction Services took effect July 15, 2026, forcing major platforms to delete user-created companions. The US FTC’s inquiry into seven companion companies continues, and the federal GUARD Act proposes nationwide age verification.
This page reflects sources available as of August 21, 2026, and the numbers will move; the ongoing record lives in the Stay Social journal. Quote the dates with the figures.
Sources: Common Sense Media, “Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs” (July 2025). Institute for Family Studies (2025). BYU Wheatley Institute, “Secret Soulmates” (May 2026). Male Allies UK, “Voice of the Boys” (October 2025). Internetstiftelsen, “Svenskarna och internet” (November 2025). Appfigures via TechCrunch (2025). Sensor Tower, State of AI (2026), and via SCMP (2024) and PocketGamer.biz (2025). KrAsia (2026). Sacra, Character.AI profile (2025). De Freitas et al., Harvard Business School (October 2025). Center for Democracy and Technology (May 2026). Drexel University ETHOS lab (2026). De Freitas et al., Journal of Consumer Research (2025). Li et al., Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2026). Yuan and Aledavood, Aalto University, CHI (2026). JAMA Network Open (2026). Cheng et al., Science (2026). California SB 243; New York S9051; Regulation (EU) 2024/1689; Cyberspace Administration of China Interim Measures (2026). Similarweb, character.ai traffic analytics (July 2026).
