--- title: Doubao’s AI companions are gone. Users get 3 months to... description: ByteDance shut down custom AI companion agents on Doubao on July 15, following Beijing's new AI companion regulations. Users were given read-only access to... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/doubao-s-ai-companions-are-gone-users-get-3-months-to-screenshot-what-is-left--j4xinys1j twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Doubao’s AI companions are gone. Users get 3 months to screenshot what is left. | daily.dev og:description: ByteDance shut down custom AI companion agents on Doubao on July 15, following Beijing's new AI companion regulations. Users were given read-only access to... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/doubao-s-ai-companions-are-gone-users-get-3-months-to-screenshot-what-is-left--j4xinys1j og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/j4xiNys1J.png og:image:alt: Doubao’s AI companions are gone. Users get 3 months to screenshot what is left. og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Doubao’s AI companions are gone. Users get 3 months to screenshot what is left. **[The Next Web](https://daily.dev/sources/tnw)** · 4 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary ByteDance shut down custom AI companion agents on Doubao on July 15, following Beijing's new AI companion regulations. Users were given read-only access to their chat histories until October 15, after which the data will no longer be viewable. Alibaba's Qwen similarly disabled its humanlike and user-created agents with no grace period. Neither platform offered a way to export accumulated conversation histories or memories. Doubao had 382 million monthly active users in May, and users had previously built over 8 million agents on the platform. The shutdown has left emotionally attached users — some with hundreds of thousands of messages exchanged — with no meaningful way to preserve their data. Users are being redirected to smaller dedicated companion apps like Maoxiang, which are roughly 80 times smaller in scale than the general-purpose platforms that just dropped the feature. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What happened to Doubao's custom AI companion agents after 15 July? ByteDance shut down custom AI agents on Doubao on 15 July, converting them to read-only access until 15 October, after which the data will be handled under its privacy policy and become unviewable and unrecoverable inside the app. Users were told to screenshot conversations or export text before the closing date. No option exists to transfer a companion's memory to another product; ByteDance instead points users to its separate app, Maoxiang, to build a new agent from scratch. _Follow how china's ai companion rules reshape products like doubao and qwen on daily.dev._ ### Did Alibaba's Qwen also remove AI companion features, and did it give users a transition period? Yes, Alibaba disabled Qwen's humanlike and user-created agents on 10 July, with the wider agent services shut off five days later, and gave users no equivalent grace period, telling them they would simply lose access to agent settings and prior conversations at shutdown. This is a harsher transition than Doubao's three-month read-only archive window. _Track how ai companion shutdowns like qwen's compare across platforms on daily.dev._ ### How many users were affected by the Doubao and Qwen AI companion shutdowns? Doubao had 382 million monthly active users in May and Qwen had 167 million, according to QuestMobile, though neither company has disclosed how many of those users specifically maintained a custom AI companion agent. The last public figure on agent creation was from 2024, when ByteDance said users had built more than 8 million agents on Doubao, when the app had only 26 million monthly users. _Keep up with user-scale data behind ai companion policy changes like doubao's on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [China's AI companion rules force Doubao, Qwen shutdowns](https://daily.dev/posts/china-s-ai-companion-rules-force-doubao-qwen-shutdowns-2pxnjdgx7) · The Next Web · 14 upvotes · 8 comments - [Medium](https://daily.dev/posts/medium-lh1ufbxnl) · Medium · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Alibaba's new AI broke when we asked about Tiananmen Square](https://daily.dev/posts/alibaba-s-new-ai-broke-when-we-asked-about-tiananmen-square-ew8umvexq) · The Register · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#data-privacy](https://daily.dev/tags/data-privacy), [#ai-regulation](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-regulation), [#alibaba](https://daily.dev/tags/alibaba) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/doubao-s-ai-companions-are-gone-users-get-3-months-to-screenshot-what-is-left--j4xinys1j) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Doubao’s AI companions are gone. 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