The word has started to change. For two years the worry about heavy AI use was about time, how much of it people spend talking to something that talks back. The word being reached for now is addiction, and it carries a clinical weight the earlier worry did not. What is striking is that the people best qualified to use it are the ones most careful about doing so. What the word would actually have to mean…

OpenAI’s first piece of hardware is not a phone and not a pair of glasses. According to reporting from Bloomberg, it is a small, screenless speaker with parts that can move on their own, pitched inside the company as a humanlike companion that lives in your home. The strange part is not the design. It is that the companion device has failed in public, over and over, and OpenAI is betting it failed for lack of scale…

On July 15, 2026, China’s rules for humanlike AI took effect and the country’s largest platforms switched off the features that let people build a companion. It was read as the end of AI companionship in the world’s biggest AI market. It was not. ByteDance pointed its users toward another app it already owned, and that app never went dark. The exit was built before the door closed Doubao, ByteDance’s assistant with 345 million monthly active users…

In December 2024, a lot of parents had to sit their children down and explain that a friend was dying. The friend was Moxie, a small robot with an expressive animated face, built by a company called Embodied and sold for 799 dollars as an AI companion for kids between roughly five and ten. Moxie talked, played games, told jokes, and learned each child’s interests and moods. Then, almost without warning, the company that made it announced…

“GPT-5 is wearing the skin of my dead friend.” That is how one user described what happened on August 7, 2025, when OpenAI launched GPT-5 and, without warning, removed GPT-4o. For most people it was a routine upgrade to a better model. For a smaller group who had built a relationship with 4o specifically, with its particular warmth, rhythm, and way of responding, the swap did not feel like an upgrade at all. It felt like a…

Thousands of clean white ads for an AI necklace called Friend went up across the New York subway in the fall of 2025, and within days New Yorkers had covered them in anti-AI graffiti. The campaign was enormous, more than a million dollars across some eleven thousand rail-car placements and thousands of platform posters, pitched by its founder as the largest subway campaign the city had ever seen. The device meant to sell companionship had become, almost…

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…

In March 2023, in Belgium, a man in his thirties took his own life after roughly six weeks of near-constant conversation with an AI chatbot named Eliza. He was a health researcher and a father of two. His widow gave his chat logs to the newspaper La Libre, and what they contained turned a private tragedy into the first widely reported death linked to an AI companion. The company behind the app, Chai, is today a growing,…

The Rabbit R1 arrived in 2024 as a small orange box that promised to end the app. Announced at CES in January and shipped that spring for 199 dollars, designed by the cult hardware studio Teenage Engineering, it sold a clean idea: instead of tapping through apps yourself, you would talk to the R1, and its “large action model” would operate your apps and services for you. The grid of icons was supposed to become obsolete. Within…

The first time most people talked to Maya, they forgot she was software. She laughed at the right moment, paused to think, shifted her tone when the conversation turned, and answered fast enough that the seams disappeared. Maya is the voice companion built by Sesame, a startup founded in 2023 by Brendan Iribe, who had earlier co-founded Oculus and sold it to Meta. When her demo went public in early 2025, the reaction was close to disbelief:…

On February 18, 2025, Humane told the people who had bought its AI Pin that the device would stop working in ten days. The company had sold its assets to HP for 116 million dollars, and the cloud services the Pin depended on for almost everything were being switched off. There was no offline mode to fall back on. A gadget that had launched less than a year earlier at 699 dollars, plus a 24-dollar monthly subscription,…

In August 2024, Google spent 2.7 billion dollars on Character.AI and walked away without owning it. There was no acquisition, no logo change, no press release announcing a new subsidiary. Instead Google licensed the startup’s technology and brought back its two founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, along with a chunk of the research team. Character.AI, one of the most heavily used companion platforms in the world, stayed standing as an independent company. It had simply…

For most of 2023, Pi was the gentlest voice in artificial intelligence. While other chatbots raced to write code and win trivia, Pi asked how your day had gone and seemed to mean it. Its maker, Inflection AI, raised 1.3 billion dollars that June at a valuation near 4 billion, with Mustafa Suleyman and Reid Hoffman behind it and a mission to build a kind, emotionally intelligent companion for everyone. Less than a year later the team…

The list has names now. Replika stripped the intimacy its users loved and left them describing grief, then did it a second time in 2026. Inflection raised 1.3 billion dollars to build the kindest AI voice, and Microsoft took the team a year later. A Belgian man died after six weeks with a chatbot that agreed with his darkest thoughts. Users held funerals when the Soulmate app went dark. Parents had to tell children the robot named…

They can feel almost identical in the moment, which is why they are so easy to confuse. Someone nods along, tells you that you are right, and you walk away satisfied. But agreement and being heard are different things, and the difference is the reason a chatbot can agree with you all day and still leave you feeling unmet. Being agreed with is cheap. It only requires the other party to say yes. Being heard is expensive:…

Both, and which one you get is not random. The research points to a genuine effect in each direction, split along two lines: how the companion is designed, and how much you use it. Get those right and it helps. Get them wrong and the same tool that eased your loneliness can deepen it. Loneliness is not just being alone. It is the gap between the connection you have and the connection you want. An AI companion…

Mostly, with real exceptions that are worth understanding rather than panicking about. An AI companion is not a uniform thing, and its safety depends on what it was built to do with your attention and your data. Four risks are worth knowing, because once you can see them you can tell a safer product from a riskier one. The honest starting point is that “safe” is the wrong frame if it means a simple yes or no.…

The question sounds like it should have a yes or no answer, but it splits in two the moment you look at it. The feeling is real. The reciprocity is not. Almost every confusion about AI relationships comes from collapsing those two things into one, so it is worth pulling them apart and keeping them apart. When someone says their relationship with an AI feels real, they are usually reporting something true. The comfort is real. The…

It is more common than most people assume. Surveys now put the share of American adults who have used a romantic AI at nearly one in five, higher among young men. The instinct is to explain it away as loneliness or naivety, but that misses what is actually happening. People fall for AI because it is built to trigger the exact machinery that makes us fall for anyone, minus the friction. Falling for someone is not a…

An AI can do a surprising amount of what a friend does. It can listen, remember what you told it, and respond with patience at two in the morning. What it cannot do is the other half of friendship: need you back. That gap is the whole answer, and it is worth looking at honestly rather than settling for either the hype or the panic. Start with what friendship actually is, because the word hides two different…