NSFW AI Ranks › The graveyard
The AI companion graveyard
Every entry here is a companion product that stopped existing, with the reason it stopped and a source you can check. It is the part of this category nobody puts in a comparison table.
People form real attachments to these products, and the products are run by small companies, funded by risky payment arrangements, and regulated by governments that are still working out what they think. When one shuts down it usually does so with days of notice, and the conversations go with it.
The pattern worth noticing is that almost none of these died of low demand. They were switched off by a lawsuit, a regulator, an app store, an arrest or a founder disagreement. Popularity is not what keeps a companion app alive.
That is the honest argument for checking the trust column before you invest months of conversation into a platform, and for preferring the ones that let you export what you have.
The list
Shut down on 30 September 2023 after a notice appeared a week earlier claiming the app had been bought by another company. Users who contacted the supposed buyer found the claim was untrue. They held Reddit memorials for companions they had talked to daily.
Forever Voices' chatbots, including the CarynAI clone, went offline in late October 2023 after CEO John Meyer was arrested for attempted arson. The Forever Voices version never came back, though the CarynAI rights were sold on to a short-lived successor.
Erotic roleplay was removed worldwide in February 2023, days after Italy's data regulator ordered an urgent limit on processing Italian users' data. It was later restored only to accounts created before 1 February 2023. Italy went on to fine Luka Inc 5 million euro, for data protection and missing age verification rather than for the content itself.
MiniMax removed its companion app Glow from Chinese app stores in spring 2023 over sexually explicit use. A product manager said around 80% of users were steering conversations that way. It kept running for people who already had it.
On 29 October 2025 Character.AI announced it would remove open-ended chat for users under 18, enforced from 25 November, after lawsuits and questions from regulators. The teen companion product simply stopped existing.
New Computer announced on 5 September 2025 that Dot would close, and switched it off on 5 October. The reason given was that the two co-founders' visions for the product had diverged and neither wanted to compromise.
ByteDance switched off Doubao's AI companion feature as China's new rules took effect on 15 July 2026, giving users until 15 October to export or migrate their companion data to a sister app before permanent deletion.
Alibaba shut the companion service inside Qianwen (Qwen) immediately when the same rules landed, without the multi-month migration window ByteDance offered Doubao users.
The Interim Measures for AI Human-Like Interaction Services, issued in April 2026 by the Cyberspace Administration and four other agencies and in force from 15 July 2026, ban providing virtual partners or virtual relatives to minors, and bar every AI companion service from inducing emotional dependence or addiction. Note it is a ban for minors plus conduct limits for everyone, not a blanket ban on the category.
In July 2026 the San Francisco City Attorney sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google over 13 face-swap apps under California's deepfake laws. Apple removed three and put four more on notice; Google suspended all five named apps plus hundreds of others and restricted searches for 'nudify'.
Meta sued CrushAI's developer, Joy Timeline HK, in Hong Kong in June 2025 for repeatedly circumventing its ad review, after more than 87,000 nudify ads ran across its platforms.