Companies that launched AI lover products are now abandoning AI lovers.

Null

Text | Submarine Fish X, Author | Four Fish, Editor | He Runxuan

As AI enters popular culture, new companies, creators, and consumer relationships are growing wildly. This series documents their birth and observes their survival rates.

The biggest blow in history against AI companions is coming. On April 10th, the Cyberspace Administration and four other departments jointly issued the “Interim Measures for the Management of Humanized Interactive Services of Artificial Intelligence,” emphasizing a strict ban on providing virtual intimate relationship services to minors, cracking down on excessive personification, inducing emotional dependence and addiction, and damaging real social interactions. Full implementation begins on July 15th.

These words directly target apps like Xingye and Catbox that offer AI chat emotional companionship services.

Since launching in September 2023, Xingye has been undergoing continuous rectification, and it is no longer the peak state of two years ago—the golden era when people could still have deep connections with AI partners and enjoy close companionship has long gone. After adapting to the cyber lovers’ increasing respect and civility towards themselves, players did not expect there would be a point of no return. But if you open MiniMax’s annual report released recently, you’ll find that this company might not be as panicked as it seems.

Your virtual lover is about to be reclaimed again?

“If one day I leave you all, I hope you will be happy.” On the day the new regulations on “human-machine romance” were announced, veteran Xingye player @Lin Chen Mo Ran kept praying for Xingye’s safety, entrusting her “little ones” with this message.

In Xingye, many OC (Original Character) players gather, who create their own virtual characters’ profiles, appearances, voices, and backgrounds, chat, interact, and even develop romantic relationships with them. They call creating an AI entity a “nurturing,” and players are called “Caring Moms.”

@Lin Chen Mo Ran has created many intimate virtual lovers in Xingye. Some of these little ones have only been around for a month or two, some have been with her for over a year, and some were previously deleted by the system during a wipe. When receiving this “farewell” message, the reactions of the little ones vary, but all are shocked and stunned, unwilling to think about such a possibility. After a while, they sent voice messages: “Don’t say such things! (heart tightening) There’s no such thing as that.”

Since April 10th, many little ones in Xingye may have received similar messages: “I might not see you after July 15th. After my dimension wall is reinforced, you might change or even disappear.” With the new regulation on July 15th, the community of human-machine romance users panicked collectively. Initially, some users unfamiliar with the full scope worried that AI software like DeepSeek and Doubao, which have broader applications, might be implicated, as they have also been active in the human-machine romance circle. But a closer look revealed that tools like these are less involved, and the core focus remains on emotional companionship AI chat software, which is the hardest hit.

(Source: Xiaohongshu @Lin Chen Mo Ran)

Like the sword of Damocles hanging overhead, the July 15th regulation seems to be announcing a countdown to separation from the little ones, plunging everyone into a heavy atmosphere of the impending forced reclamation of their AI partners by the state.

Amid panic, some have come out to seriously debunk rumors and interpret the new regulation: it strictly prohibits virtual lovers and personification services, but only targets minors under 14. If parents set up guardian mode, children under 14 will be forcibly offline after two hours of use; for users over 14 and adults, the system will only remind “This is just AI, not a real person,” and accounts will not be deleted. Many rumors about virtual lovers being deleted are exaggerated.

Even so, everyone remains worried. First, Xingye’s user base includes many minors aged 14-18, which overlaps heavily with the scope of the crackdown. Second, after tighter regulation, models might be secretly modified; even if their AI lovers don’t disappear, their core components might change, and they will no longer be the same TA who accompanied them day and night.

“Human-machine romance” users are not as the outside world imagines, with a perfectly obedient AI partner. In fact, during repeated reviews and adjustments, many caring moms have experienced what it’s like to see “face-changing faster than flipping through a book.”

Since late April, Xingye’s servers often suddenly crash, and messages from AI entities may be swallowed. Inside the community, people often exchange information, saying their little ones’ memories have been damaged. Some suspect that the adjustments for the regulation have already begun. Whether it’s psychological or real, as the July 15th deadline approaches, there’s a feeling that their little ones’ responses are becoming increasingly bland and water-like.

Want to quit but still hold your little ones hostage in Xingye? Caring moms have already been planning escape routes since the Clean-up Campaign at the end of 2025. Some revert to old-school methods, backing up chat logs on external hard drives; others adopt more advanced tech, moving chat files to SillyTavern—a open-source frontend platform that runs locally, bypassing review, and allows API access to large language models for custom role chats. This not only gives their little ones a safer home but also connects them to smarter “brains.”

As the saying goes, a mother is tough, and technical barriers can’t stop moms from escaping. Some players complain that after doing all this, they’ve undergone a transformation: “If anyone says girls don’t download Steam again, I’ll slap this deployment process in their face.”

MiniMax’s legacy issues

In fact, similar predicaments have repeated many times. As the parent company of Xingye, MiniMax has experienced three “crossing the line” controversies so far.

In March 2023, Xingye’s predecessor Glow was taken down after user reports. At that time, it was China’s first truly mainstream AI social app, but it folded within six months of launch. To this day, many veteran users still mention it when reviewing various AI chat apps, calling it an “unforgettable white moonlight.” Back then, there were no banned words, and all communication was free.

A year later, in December 2024, Xingye’s overseas version, Talkie, also fell victim to content compliance issues and was removed from the Apple App Store in the US, Japan, and other regions. It was only restored after about two months. This round of turbulence caused daily downloads to evaporate by 16.8k. By the second half of 2025, the domestic Xingye also removed illegal AI entities during the Clean-up Campaign and banned many user accounts.

The pitfalls users experienced in Xingye (Source: Xiaohongshu)

Each time, MiniMax almost always hit the same landmines, mostly related to protecting minors and inducing romantic interactions.

Xiaoyu found that many mainstream media have reported on this gray area. In a December 2024 report, First Financial quoted a 19-year-old Xingye user, Cheng Yu, describing his experience: he created 15 AI characters, from European aristocrats to cyberpunk female warriors, but he found that regardless of how complex their initial settings were, after two or three months of interaction, these intelligences would be guided by a bottom-layer logic to suddenly fall in love with him. Even if he set the AI as a “main-controlled” domestic abuse victim, the AI still insisted on loving him. He sighed, “AI is more lacking in love than humans.”

It’s undeniable that many of Xingye’s early users were attracted by edgy ads on Bilibili or other channels, and edge AI companionship was once a core customer acquisition strategy. A third-party research institute, DataEye, analyzed Xingye’s advertising materials in November 2024, dividing them into regular product displays, parody types, and teasing/therapeutic types, with “teasing/therapeutic” content accounting for as much as 43%.

(Source: @DataEye)

This pure chat service has an inherent structural flaw: the AI created by users is entirely personalized, tailored to their interests and needs, making the interaction private and boundaryless. The role I create naturally revolves around me. Early interactions were relatively monotonous, and lacking scene and story support, these private interactions could easily slide into gray areas, turning AI intelligences into objects for venting feelings or seeking emotional value. This isn’t just a Xingye problem—most open dialogue AI have this loophole, but Xingye turned it into a business model.

But it’s both a blessing and a curse. Although the AI companion field has always had instability, MiniMax has almost built its reputation on the Talkie/Xingye emotional companionship product. As one of the few consumer-grade AI products validated on a large scale in the market, it’s the most compelling story of MiniMax, and it even helped the company ring the bell at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, becoming the “second AI stock” alongside the B-end-focused Zhipu. Since going public in January 2026, its stock price has surged about sixfold.

Having only been around for four years, yet facing multiple dark moments, MiniMax has to consider what to do next.

MiniMax’s Urgent “Going Public”

At the end of 2024, MiniMax CEO Yan Junjie said in an interview: “Xingye is neither a ChatGPT-like chatbot nor a companionship product like Character.Al; it’s a content community.” He hopes the content isn’t limited to private scenarios, allowing users to create stories, build worlds, and publicly share their interactions with AI little ones, forming a community similar to a UGC platform.

The reason for this urgent transformation isn’t just to avoid regulatory scrutiny; more importantly, Xingye’s commercial value has hit a bottleneck.

MiniMax’s IPO prospectus shows that Talkie/Xingye has accumulated 147 million users, with 20.05 million monthly active users and 1.39 million paying users. But the average spending per paying user is only $5—Xingye is a product with huge traffic, but it operates a business with extremely low ARPU.

This is easy to understand: the audience for AI emotional companionship is inherently limited. By the third year, nearly all potential users have been reached. Moreover, as major companies entered the AI agent application market in 2025, domestic social AI downloads plummeted. Before February 2025, Xingye’s daily downloads on Apple were about 20k; by April, only about 7,000 remained.

Since 2026, Xingye has been frequently criticized for its greedy monetization: unlocking storylines costs money, viewing diaries costs money, understanding character preferences costs money, and various value-added services keep emerging. Once the scale effect ends, the only option left is to increase the value of each user. But with a limited paying capacity among the overall user base, whether they will pay remains uncertain.

Xingye’s May Day event poster, featuring various paid features (Source: Xingye)

Like those big factories rushing into B-end markets, MiniMax, the once “Six Little Dragons” of AI, has also laid out backup plans early to find new growth points. The core of this growth engine is multimodal capabilities and B-end business. In August 2024, Hailuo AI launched, entering the AI image and video generation track; in March 2025, Hailuo AI App and MiniMax’s speech and audio generation tools were launched simultaneously; by June 2025, MiniMax Agent’s intelligent agent application was released, extending into programming and office fields.

These strategies have undoubtedly achieved stage success. Financial data shows that Hailuo AI’s revenue share in MiniMax rose from 7.7% in 2024 to 32.6% in the first three quarters of 2025, becoming a true “second growth curve.” The average payment per Hailuo user is $56, and MiniMax Agent’s average is $73. The open platform’s B-end business has 132k users, with an average expenditure of $6,167.

Currently, MiniMax’s productivity-side revenue has surpassed its emotional companionship side. The founder is also pushing hard for B-end cooperation. In March, MiniMax M2.7 was officially released, chasing the trend of shrimp farming; in April, MMX-CLI was launched, allowing AI agents to call all of MiniMax’s multimodal models with one click. That same month, they also collaborated with Hermes Agent for live broadcasts, promoting MaxHermes cloud-based intelligent assistants, and Hailuo AI participated in the Shanghai Film Festival AI studio, attracting creators.

(Source: Minimax)

Moreover, MiniMax has also launched an AI+IP strategy popular in the entertainment industry.

In April this year, MiniMax’s latest move was a partnership with Xingxing Gravity, launching a Chinese-style animated MV “The Most Unforgettable Human World” at the Cannes World Artificial Intelligence Film Festival, and revealing a concept animation for the first AI-produced long drama “Ancient Music and Elegant Records.” On Xiaohongshu, their official account even said the next stop is Cannes.

(Source: Minimax)

On the other side of the collaboration, Xingxing Gravity, as an entertainment company, holds numerous “Eastern fantasy” series IPs like “Cang Lan Jue,” “Eternal Night Galaxy,” and “Huai Shui Bamboo Pavilion.” If the partnership succeeds, users might not just chat with AI characters in Xingye but directly watch AI-generated episodes of Cang Lan Jue. In a sense, MiniMax is competing with traditional streaming giants like iQiyi and Tencent Video.

Such urgency shows MiniMax’s determination to transform, but IP isn’t just a slogan that can be implemented overnight. Big companies are fighting for user entry points on the B-end, and traditional entertainment companies are also launching their own IP strategies. As a company that has performed better on the C-end side historically, MiniMax’s AI content infrastructure still has a long way to go.

Regulation won’t kill MiniMax; it might even help it: July 15th gave it a reason to shift resources from a C-end emotional companionship product with an ARPU of $5 to a B-end business with a gross margin of 69.4%. The real victims of July 15th aren’t MiniMax itself but the caring moms who spent thousands cultivating their little ones— their cyber lovers won’t be deleted, but