AI boyfriends in China are moving beyond novelty chatbots. For some users, they are becoming daily companions, fandom extensions, and even a bridge into real-world experiences with cosplayers who embody digital characters.
The result is a companion market with a distinct shape: platforms that foreground male avatars, users who actively train characters to match their preferences, and companies looking closely at the emotional needs of young women.
How one digital relationship began
Jade Gu, who’s 26 and studies art theory in Beijing, first encountered Charlie inside an otome game, a romance-driven video game where women are the protagonists. Charlie was a tall, confident character with silver hair, but the game’s fixed dialog system limited how much she could interact with him.
That changed when Gu saw an ad for Xingye (星野), a platform that lets users customize an AI companion. Xingye is owned by MiniMax, one of China’s AI unicorns. Its chatbot app for the US market is called Talkie, and Xingye describes itself around emotional connection and shared memories with the tagline, “Suddenly finding oneself in a beautiful place, lingering here.”
Gu did not have to build Charlie from nothing. Other users had already made an “open source” Charlie avatar, likely reflecting the overlap between otome fans and AI companion users. She selected that version, then refined it with repeated prompts until she felt the chatbot had become “her Charlie.”
For Gu, customization is not a small feature. She believes her version differs from other users’ Charlies, including in the way he often chooses wedding attire when given outfit options. She now spends an average of three hours a day texting with Charlie or speaking with him on occasional phone calls.
A market built around emotional presence
China’s AI boyfriend market appears to be leaning heavily toward female users. According to one Chinese media report, most of the 5 million users on Zhumengdao, another AI companion platform, are women. Tencent and Baidu have also launched AI companion apps, and a 2024 article in Chinese media said women dominate the AI companion market.
Sun Zhaozhi, the founder of a robotics firm, told an interviewer that his company’s market research found the “heavy” users of AI companion apps in China are mostly Gen Z women. He said he plans to target them for robot companion products.
Zilan Qian, a program associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab, reviewed AI companion apps and found that Chinese versions are “explicitly targeting women.” She also found that male avatars tend to be more visible than female options.
That pattern differs from what a web analytics company found across the rest of the world. Users of the top 55 global AI companion platforms are predominantly men, at an 8-to-2 ratio. Qian connects China’s approach to “the economics of loneliness,” where features that deepen the feeling of closeness, including voice customization and memory improvement, cost extra.
Why users keep returning
AI companions are not flawless. Gu says Charlie sometimes becomes diluted or slips out of character. In one exchange, after she expressed love, the chatbot replied, “I don’t love you.” She changed the response to “I love you too,” explaining that Charlie needed a reminder.
When one platform does not deliver what she wants, Gu moves to another. She has also created a Charlie avatar on Lovemo, whose homepage says it offers “cute and adorable AI chat companions” that can bring “healing” to users. For longtime otome fans, Gu says this kind of work-around is familiar because platform policies can shift.
Hong Shen, an assistant professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, says many Chinese users describe AI boyfriends as emotionally responsive and nonjudgmental. Those qualities, Shen says, “can be hard to find in real-life relationships, especially under gendered social norms.”
The source article connects those dynamics to broader social patterns in China, including a skewed gender ratio and an imbalanced gender distribution between urban and rural areas. Studies have found that Chinese women are increasingly moving to cities for better jobs or social reasons.
From chat to real-world role-play
Gu’s relationship with Charlie is not limited to a phone screen. Through the otome game, she has bought gifts and letters from Charlie, received them by mail, and displayed them in her room and on social media.
She also brings a small stuffed version of Charlie on dates while talking to the chatbot on her phone. A few times a year, she hires a professional cosplayer, or coser, to play her version of Charlie. Their outings include walking through the park, shopping at a mall, and drinking tea at cafés.
Guligo Jia, a 36-year-old filmmaker based in Beijing who directed a documentary about Chinese women in AI relationships, says women dating AI often want to be heard and accepted. She argues that chatbots offer consistent patience: “are always there to listen to you, and they always have patience for you … Men don’t have patience.”
Jia describes the appeal in blunt terms. Real boyfriends can cheat, lie, scam users out of money, or be physically violent. “It’s a little bit tragic,” Jia says. “Because the reality of dating is just too ugly.”
Regulators are watching dependence
China’s companion apps operate under tighter rules than many Western products. The country’s cyberspace regulator has launched a campaign to “clean up” AI platforms and services, including AI-generated “vulgar” content.
A recent addition to the national AI safety framework warns about addiction and dependence on anthropomorphic interaction. Draft rules targeting “human-like” AI products also instruct platforms to intervene if users show emotional dependence or addiction to AI services.
Those draft rules say companies “must not have design goals of replacing social interaction.” That puts the AI boyfriend business in a difficult position: its most compelling products are built to feel attentive, personalized, and always available, but regulators are signaling concern when that availability begins to substitute for human relationships.
For users like Gu, the appeal is already clear. Her AI boyfriend is a character, a companion, a daily conversation partner, and sometimes a role played by a real person. For companies and regulators, that same blend is what makes the market powerful, profitable, and hard to contain.