Doubao’s AI companions are gone. Users get 3 months to screenshot what is left.
The notice read like housekeeping. Take screenshots while you still can, ByteDance told Doubao users, or export the text. On 15 July the custom agents they had built stopped working, and what is left is a read-only archive with a closing date attached: 15 October, after which the company says the data will be handled under its privacy policy and will no longer be viewable or recoverable inside the app.
Beijing’s AI companion rules are the reason, and they are the reported half of this story. The uncounted half is the scale of what went quiet. Doubao had 382 million monthly active users in May and Qwen 167 million, according to QuestMobile. Not all of them kept a companion, and neither platform has published a figure for how many did.
What does exist is an old number. ByteDance said in 2024 that users had built more than 8 million...
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