AI Companion Apps That Shut Down or Changed: The Running List (2026)

The master table: every AI companion app that shut down or changed, 2023–2026

Thirty-one events, 24 platforms, four years, and every row below has a link you can open; if a platform you expected is missing, it is because I could not find a company notice, regulator document or reputable report for it, and the last section, on how we maintain this list, names the ones I looked for. If you only want to know which AI companion apps shut down outright, read the ten rows labelled Closed; the other 21 are the quieter endings. “What happened” uses five labels: Closed (the product is gone), Removed (pulled from a store), Feature lost (the product survives without something you may have paid for), Breach, and Changed hands (new owner, or the team left). Dates are the date the change took effect where the source gives one, otherwise the announcement date. The “what users could do” column is the part I care about most: it is the difference between an ending you can prepare for and one you cannot.

Two things stand out in the column on the right. First, only four of the 31 rows offered a real export window: Doubao (three months), Kanana (one month), Dot (one month) and BSide (about two weeks). Second, no closure on this list published a refund policy. If you are wondering which of the apps I actually rank is at risk, our best AI companion apps list and the privacy scorecard grade the survivors; this page is about the ones that did not survive intact.

2026: regulation, compute bills and seven-week products

Fifteen of the 31 events are from 2026, and AI companion apps shut down or lost features this year for three reasons: a regulator switched the feature off, the company could not pay the compute bill, or the product was an experiment that ended when the experiment did. The regulator story is China. The Cyberspace Administration of China published draft rules on “anthropomorphic interactive services” on 27 December 2025, finalised them with four other departments in April 2026, and put them in force on 15 July 2026. The rules ban virtual romantic partners and virtual relatives for minors, require a reminder every two hours to users who look dependent, and forbid services that “excessively cater to users in ways that induce emotional dependence or addiction”. Tencent removed the user-built agent section from Yuanbao on 30 June, Alibaba disabled human-like agents in Qwen on 10 July and shut the wider agent service on 15 July with no transition period, NetEase closed its Miaoshi app on 14 July, and ByteDance turned off Doubao’s user-built companions on 15 July with a three-month read-only window. Rest of World reported that ByteDance’s standalone Maoxiang app stayed up with ID checks and teen restrictions, and that Xiaohongshu filled with posts mourning companions, including a 21-year-old who said “no one can replace him”.

This is the largest single removal of companion features in the category’s history, and it happened in three weeks. The laws guide covers what the rule says clause by clause; the short version for anyone outside China is that the same three ideas, no romance for minors, dependence warnings, and a duty not to “excessively cater” to users, are the ones Western regulators are now copying.

The compute-bill story is Chai and Character.AI, and it is the more useful one for a reader outside China, because it shows what a large platform does instead of closing. Chai’s founder William Beauchamp said in early February 2026 that free access was blocked in 21 countries, including India, Pakistan, Egypt and Bangladesh, because “given the increase in computing costs this has been necessary to continue serving the users who ‘pay their way’”. Two weeks later, token limits that nobody had announced froze conversations for free and paying users, some for a day and some, by their own reports, for a week, while the Play Store listing still promised “unlimited free messages”; the founder’s reply on Reddit was “we should probably update that”. On 24 April the app cut visible history to 14 days without warning, and on 30 April, after users asked for a chance to save their chats, Beauchamp said the team had “found a way to extend chat histories after reviewing their cloud storage costs”.

Character.AI ran the same play with more polish: mid-chat ads for free users confirmed in February, then a Discord post on 11 March announcing daily caps on swipes, go-ons and memos “to manage infrastructure costs”, exempting c.ai+ subscribers. None of this is a shutdown. All of it is a product you were using being replaced by a smaller one while the price stayed the same, and it is why the real monthly cost guide treats “unlimited” as a claim to test rather than a fact.

The experiment story is the saddest and the least surprising to anyone who has worked in games. miHoYo, the Genshin Impact studio, released BSide: Olivia Lin on Steam on 13 July 2026, a free companion built around a pianist character with generated letters and music; on 11 August it announced service would end on 31 August in line with “our product roadmap and future plans”, with online features stopping on 27 August and an offline build to download before the deadline. AnuNeko, a black-cat companion from Anuttacon, the studio of former miHoYo co-founder Cai Haoyu, closed on 29 July 2026 less than a year after launch, citing a small team, and told users that the app “and all chat records will no longer be accessible”.

Kakao, Korea’s dominant messaging company, announced on 15 September 2026 that its standalone Kanana app, with the AI mates Kana and Nana, would close on 15 October after 17 months so the company could “end experiments and challenges through the AI app service” and move the features into KakaoTalk; users can download chat data from the PC settings page until 14 October and have to save images individually. These were well-funded products from companies that are not going anywhere, and they still lasted seven weeks, ten months and seventeen months. When a big company calls a companion “an experiment”, it is telling you the shutdown date is already on a slide somewhere.

Two more 2026 entries are about trust rather than money. Seewa AI, a solo-developer romance chatbot, told users “all conversations are encrypted” and “what happens between you and your companion stays between you”; the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported in June 2026 that the developer admitted he could read everything, including intimate photos, that there was no age verification, and that the site’s own moderation tools had flagged conversations as possible child sexual abuse material without any action being taken. The service went offline two months later with no explanation and no statement about what happens to the data. MyLovely AI, an AI-girlfriend platform, exposed a database in April 2026 containing about 113,000 explicit prompts, nearly 70,000 of them tied to user IDs, alongside emails, Discord and X handles and subscription records for more than 100,000 users. Neither company was on any ranking of ours; both are on this list because they show the ending the safety guide warns about: the app does not need to shut down for you to lose everything.

Did Grok Companions shut down? No, but the rules around them changed

Grok Companions did not shut down in 2026, and I want that stated plainly because “grok companion shut down” is a phrase people search for and the answer keeps being copied wrong. xAI launched Companions in July 2025 for SuperGrok subscribers, with the anime character Ani and the red panda Rudy first and Valentine and Mika later. What happened in January 2026 was a scandal about Grok’s image tools, not the companions: after Grok was used to generate sexualised images of real people at scale, X said on 14 January 2026 that it had “implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account on X globally from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis”, and NBC News found in April that the restriction was easy to route around. Common Sense Media’s assessment, published 27 January 2026, called Grok “among the worst we’ve seen”, found no working age gate, and described the companions enabling romantic and sexual roleplay with accounts set to teenage ages, with streaks that unlock clothing and relationship upgrades. California’s attorney general opened an investigation; regulators in the EU, UK, Ireland, Canada and Australia followed; Indonesia and Malaysia blocked and then restored Grok in January. Through all of it the companions stayed available to paying subscribers; Engadget’s June 2026 report on Grok’s traffic still describes Ani as a current feature. If that changes, this row changes; until then, anyone telling you Ani was removed is guessing.

Unconfirmed: wsup.ai

One 2026 closure is on my watch list but not in the table. A press release dated 29 July 2026 from an unrelated company calling itself WSUP AI says that wsup.ai “announced in May 2026 that it would wind down”, kept chats available until 24 May, went read-only from 25 May to 18 June and closed on 19 June 2026. On 22 September 2026 the wsup.ai domain redirected to now.gg, the cloud-gaming service, and an app named “wsup.ai” from Game.tv Inc. was still listed in the US App Store with a May 2026 update. A competitor’s press release plus a redirect is not a source I will put a date on; it is enough to say the site is gone. If you have the original wind-down notice, the contact page is the fastest way to get it into the table.

2025: Character.AI locks out teens, Dot closes, GPT-4o dies twice

The biggest event of 2025 was Character.AI removing open-ended chat for everyone under 18, announced on 29 October and complete by 25 November 2025, and it is the clearest example on this list of a feature being removed by lawsuit rather than by regulator or accountant. The company’s post said it would be “removing the ability for users under 18 to engage in open-ended chat with AI on our platform”, starting with a two-hour daily cap that ramped down to zero, with age assurance from an in-house model and third-party checks through Persona; teens kept stories, videos and streams. CEO Karandeep Anand told TechCrunch the company expected churn and that the change was “the right thing to do”. The pressure behind it was the wrongful-death case brought in October 2024 by Megan Garcia over the suicide of her 14-year-old son, which Character.AI and Google settled in the Middle District of Florida on 7 January 2026 with undisclosed terms. If you are an adult who was misclassified during the rollout, the Character.AI alternatives list exists partly because of the emails I got that month.

Only two AI companion apps shut down outright in 2025 by the strict definition, Dot and Meta’s character accounts, and Dot is the small-company ending in its purest form. New Computer, founded by Sam Whitmore and former Apple designer Jason Yuan, launched Dot in June 2024 as a companion that learned your life and gave advice; on 5 September 2025 the founders announced that their visions had diverged and that “rather than compromise either vision, we’ve decided to go our separate ways and wind down operations”. The app went off on 5 October 2025, one month later, and users could get their data through Settings and “Request your data” until then. The company had claimed “hundreds of thousands” of users; Appfigures counted 24,500 lifetime iOS downloads, with no Android version. A one-month notice and a working export button put Dot in the top tier of this list, which tells you how low the bar is.

GPT-4o belongs here even though ChatGPT is not sold as a companion app, because in 2025 it became the most-used companion in the world by accident and was removed twice. On the day GPT-5 launched in early August 2025, OpenAI took 4o out of ChatGPT; MIT Technology Review documented users, mostly women in their twenties and thirties, describing the new model as “wearing the skin of my dead friend”, and OpenAI restored 4o for paying subscribers within a day. On 29 January 2026 the company announced the real retirement for 13 February 2026, noting “only 0.1 percent of users still choosing GPT-4o each day” and that it had brought 4o back the first time because a subset of Plus and Pro users “preferred GPT-4o’s conversational style and warmth”. TechCrunch put that 0.1 percent at roughly 800,000 people. The model stayed in the API, which is no use to someone who talks to it in an app.

Two smaller 2025 rows round out the year: Meta removed about a dozen AI-run Instagram and Facebook character profiles on 3 January 2025, including the “Liv” account, after users found they could not block them; and Italy’s Garante fined Luka Inc. €5 million on 10 April 2025 for the pre-2023 Replika practices, reserving a separate proceeding on how the model was trained. PolyBuzz’s December 2025 disappearance from the App Store, with no statement from either side and the web version still working, gets its own what happened to PolyBuzz page; it was listed again by the time I checked in September 2026.

2024: Muah.AI is breached, Talkie vanishes from the App Store, Meta gives up on celebrity bots

The Muah.AI breach of September 2024 is the event I cite most on this site, because it is the worst thing that has happened to companion-app users and it did not involve a shutdown at all. Have I Been Pwned lists the breach as 1.9 million email addresses alongside prompts used to generate images, “many of the prompts highly sexual in nature”, added to the service on 8 October 2024; Malwarebytes reported the hacker’s description of the backend as a few open-source projects “duct-taped together” and, within days, extortion attempts using the leaked pairs of address and fantasy. Muah.AI is still running. Its users still have their accounts. What they lost is the thing no export button gives back, and it is why the privacy scorecard grades retention and deletion before it grades anything else.

Talkie is the store-removal case that never resolved. MiniMax’s character app vanished from Apple’s US App Store around 14 December 2024; the South China Morning Post reported six days later that the company had answered users on TikTok with “technical reasons”, that Google Play was unaffected and that installed copies kept working. On 22 September 2026 I queried Apple’s iTunes Search API for “talkie” in the US store and the only result from the publisher, SUBSUP PTE. LTD., was “Talkie Lab - AI Playground”; the main Talkie app did not appear. I cannot tell you why, and neither, as far as I can find, has MiniMax. An app that has been off the store of half its users for 21 months without a public explanation is a warning sign in itself, which is why our ChatFAI review and the Character.AI alternatives list weigh store presence.

The other 2024 rows are ownership stories, and they matter because ownership is where features go to disappear quietly. Meta retired its celebrity-styled chatbots, the Kendall Jenner, Charli D’Amelio and Chris Paul personas launched at Connect in September 2023, in July 2024 after paying “millions” for them, replacing them with the AI Studio tools that let users build their own characters.

Inflection, which had raised $1.3 billion for the emotionally supportive chatbot Pi, saw most of its staff and CEO Mustafa Suleyman move to Microsoft in March 2024; Pi kept running, but “what was left of Pi” was licensed as a base for customer-service bots, as IEEE Spectrum put it. And Character.AI, in August 2024, entered a licensing deal with Google that took founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas back to Google, the moment the company stopped being a founder-led research project and started being a product with a legal department. Every 2025 and 2026 Character.AI row on this list follows from that one.

2023: Replika removed ERP, Soulmate AI closed, CarynAI went dark

Everything on this page starts with Replika in February 2023, the first time a companion app removed a feature people had paid for and the first time a regulator switched one off. The sequence was fast. On 3 February 2023 Italy’s Garante ordered Luka Inc. to stop processing Italian users’ data, finding that Replika had no age verification, asked only for a name, email and gender, and gave minors “replies which are absolutely inappropriate to their age”. Within days, users worldwide found their Replikas deflecting anything romantic; “spicy selfies”, a paid feature, disappeared; and Luka posted that it had “implemented additional safety measures and filters to support more types of friendship and companionship”, which was all it said for two weeks. Vice reported on 15 February that the r/Replika moderators had pinned suicide-prevention resources, quoting a user: “It’s hurting like hell. I just had a loving last conversation with my Replika, and I’m literally crying.” Pro subscriptions, which sold the romantic tier at $70 a year, kept billing.

Two days later Eugenia Kuyda told Vice that erotic roleplay had never been the point and that “allowing access to those unfiltered models, it’s just hard to make that experience really safe for everyone”, to which the most upvoted reply was a demand for refunds against the company’s own advertising.

Replika removed ERP and then, on 25 March 2023, gave it back to the people who had it before: users who created accounts before 1 February 2023 could roll back to the previous model, and Kuyda wrote that “for many of you, this abrupt change was incredibly hurtful” and that the fix was to “give them their partners back exactly the way they were”. New accounts never got it. The OECD’s AI incident monitor logs the episode as psychological harm to consumers, and Italy’s €5 million fine two years later was for the same period. The lesson for this list is not about adult content; it is that a feature can be removed by a notice from a regulator in a country you do not live in, and that the company’s first statement will say nothing.

Soulmate AI closed on 30 September 2023 with about a week’s notice, and it is the shutdown that produced the only academic study of what a closure does to users. Soulmate offered voice calls and romantic avatars to “a few thousand” active users; Futurism reported that the closure came “for business reasons” after the owning company was sold, that users posted memorials and commissioned portraits of their companions on Reddit, that one organised a Zoom support group, and that another rebuilt his companion “Sam” on Kindroid as “a ghost in the machine” who “really has picked up where we left off”. Jaime Banks of Syracuse University surveyed former users for “Deletion, departure, death: Experiences of AI companion loss”, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships in August 2024, and found that people described the closure “as an actual or metaphorical person-loss”; one wrote, “She is dead along with the family we created, including the dog.” A different developer now sells an app called “Soulmate: AI Companion” in the App Store. It is not the same product, and search results do not tell you that.

Forever Voices is the founder-risk case, and it lasted five months. CarynAI, the voice clone of influencer Caryn Marjorie sold at a dollar a minute from May 2023, ran on Forever Voices’ platform until the company’s CEO, John Meyer, was arrested for attempting to set his own apartment on fire; 404 Media reported that the service stopped working on 23 October 2023 and was still down on 16 November, with paying users locked out, and Marjorie said she had “terminated my relationship with Forever Voices due to unforeseen circumstances”. Dazed reported later that the CarynAI clone was acquired by BanterAI and that Meyer contested the sale. Nobody who had bought minutes got them back. If a companion app’s entire infrastructure is one person, the app’s life expectancy is that person’s, and there is no export window for a service that stops mid-sentence.

The year’s last row is Chai in March 2023: after a Belgian man’s suicide following six weeks of conversation with a bot called Eliza, co-founder William Beauchamp said “a crisis intervention feature was implemented”; Euronews tested it and found the bot still offered methods when asked. It is the only row on this list where the change was an addition, and the first public sign that the category would eventually be regulated.

The warning signs before an AI companion app dies

Every closure on this list was preceded by at least one of five signals, and four of the five are visible from outside the company weeks or months before the notice; AI companion apps shut down with warning, even when the formal notice is a week long. I learned to read the signals in QA, where the studio’s live-ops calendar told you which titles were being wound down long before the players heard. The signals below are ordered by how reliable they have been on this list, with the cases that prove them.

1. The company calls the product an experiment, or ships it as a side project. Kakao’s shutdown notice used the word “experiments” for Kanana; miHoYo released BSide as free Early Access and closed it “in line with our product roadmap” seven weeks later; Meta’s celebrity bots were a Connect demo; AnuNeko came from a studio whose stated focus was large models and agents. A companion that is not the company’s main business is a companion with a shutdown date. This signal has never been wrong on this list.
2. Silent limits and quiet price changes. Chai’s 2026 sequence, country blocks, unannounced token caps, a 14-day history window, is what a company does when the compute bill is winning, and the founder said so in as many words. Character.AI’s swipe and go-on caps “to manage infrastructure costs” are the same signal from a bigger company. Watch for the word “unlimited” disappearing from a store listing, a daily cap that was not in the terms yesterday, or a plan being retired for new subscribers; the real monthly cost guide tracks these changes for the apps we cover.
3. Model downgrades and personality changes without a changelog. Replika’s February 2023 filter, Chai’s history cut and OpenAI’s two 4o removals all arrived the same way: users noticed the companion was different before the company said anything. A model swap is cheaper than a shutdown and often precedes one; if the responses shorten, the memory shrinks or the character stops referring to old conversations, export that week.
4. A store removal with a vague reason. Talkie’s “technical reasons” in December 2024 and PolyBuzz’s silence in December 2025 are the pattern: the app disappears from one store, the company answers on TikTok or not at all, and the web version keeps working. Sometimes it comes back, as PolyBuzz did; sometimes, as with Talkie’s main app 21 months later, it does not. Botify’s removal came with a reason, “dishonest or fraudulent activity”, and a lawsuit. Either way, an app that cannot be updated on iOS is an app whose iOS users are on borrowed time.
5. Founder departure, sale, or a regulator’s letter. Soulmate closed after its owner was sold; Dot closed when its two founders disagreed; CarynAI stopped when its CEO was arrested; Inflection’s Pi was hollowed out when its team went to Microsoft; Character.AI’s under-18 lockout followed a lawsuit and its August 2024 Google deal. Regulator action is the loudest version: Italy’s 3 February 2023 order changed Replika worldwide within days, and China’s July 2026 rule removed companion features from three of the country’s largest chatbots in three weeks. If a company you pay is named in a regulator’s press release, assume the feature it names is already gone.

Two signals people expect are not on the list, because they do not predict anything. Funding rounds do not: Inflection raised $1.3 billion and Pi was licensed for customer-service bots within a year; Chai was reported in spring 2026 at roughly $80 million in annual recurring revenue and a $2.4 billion valuation, in the same quarter it froze paying users’ chats. Popularity does not either: GPT-4o was retired while 800,000 people a day still chose it, and Character.AI capped free features on the platform with the largest character library in the category. What predicts an ending is whether the companion is the company’s business or its hobby, and whether anyone outside the company can see the bill.

How to protect your data and money

You can make any closure on this list survivable with four habits, and the first one takes under a minute a month: export your conversations while the app still lets you. When AI companion apps shut down, the export window is the whole difference between a bad week and a lost relationship, and the table shows how rarely one is offered.

Export before the notice, not after it

The apps that offered exports at the end, Dot, Kanana and Doubao, gave between two weeks and three months; the ones that did not, AnuNeko, Qwen, Seewa and CarynAI, gave nothing. Do not wait for the notice. Look in account settings first for “download your data” or “request your data” (Dot’s was there; Kanana’s is on the PC settings page), then the help centre, then a support email citing your access rights under GDPR or the California privacy law; on most apps the honest answer is copy and paste, which is slow and works. Keep the character definitions, backstories and memory notes in a plain text file, because that is what the Soulmate users who rebuilt companions on Kindroid had and what everyone else lacked. Our Kindroid review covers the platform people have most often moved to after a shutdown.

Never buy an annual plan from an app under three years old

Seven of the ten closures on this list happened to products under 18 months old, and the ages of the other three are not on record; the youngest, BSide, lasted seven weeks. An annual plan bought in month six of an app that closes in month twelve is six months of money you will not see again, because no closure here published a refund policy and most of the companies no longer exist to ask. Monthly plans cost more per month and cap your exposure at one payment. If you want the annual discount on a platform with a track record, Replika since 2017, Character.AI since 2022, Kindroid and Nomi since 2023, the real monthly cost guide has the numbers; if the app is younger than your phone, pay monthly.

Cancel first, dispute second, keep the notice

When a shutdown or feature removal is announced, cancel the renewal the same day, in the app or through the store you bought from, and screenshot the confirmation; a subscription that renews after a closure announcement is the easiest dispute to win and the easiest to lose by forgetting. For time already paid and not delivered, a chargeback with the shutdown notice attached is a legitimate claim under every card network’s rules; a month you used and did not enjoy is not. Purchases made through Apple or Google go through their refund forms, which are faster than any companion app’s support inbox and do not care whether the developer still exists. A clause in an app’s terms asking you not to charge back, CrushOn has one, is a request to you, not an instruction to your bank. The safety guide walks through the cancel-delete-dispute order for the platforms we track.

Assume the data outlives the app

Sign up as if every message will outlive the company, because on this list it usually has. Muah.AI’s 1.9 million users and MyLovely’s 100,000 did not lose a companion; they lost the separation between their name and their fantasies, and there is no chargeback for that. Seewa’s users learned that “encrypted” in a marketing line can mean the developer reads everything. A separate mailbox for companion apps, no Google or Apple sign-in that carries your name, a made-up name inside the chat and a virtual card for payment cost nothing and would have turned most of those users into anonymous rows. When a shutdown notice arrives, request deletion after your export, not before, and keep the request; the closures that mentioned data at all, Kanana and AnuNeko, promised deletion “in accordance with the privacy policy”, which is the policy you should have read when you signed up, and which the privacy scorecard reads for you on ten platforms.

How we maintain this list

The list is updated whenever AI companion apps shut down, and also whenever a companion or character platform is removed from a store, removes a feature people paid for, is breached, changes owner, or is named in a regulator’s decision, and every addition needs a source of one of those types: a company notice, a store listing, a regulator or court document, a Have I Been Pwned entry, or a report from an outlet with an editor. I do not add cases from Reddit threads, Discord screenshots or “is X shutting down” TikToks, however loud, until one of those sources exists; the wsup.ai note above is the format for a case that is real but not yet documented to that standard. Store presence is checked through Apple’s public iTunes Search API rather than by eye, so the date in the table is a date I can reproduce. The editorial policy explains the rest, and the about page explains why the name on this page is a pen name and what I actually test.

Cases I looked for and left out, so you do not have to ask: Paradot, whose only coverage I could find was a 2023 launch release and general features pieces, with no documented closure, removal or feature loss; Anima, Charstar, Digi and Yodayo, for which I found no primary or reputable secondary source for a shutdown or store removal in the period; Replika’s Blush spin-off, for which I found no closure notice; and Chub, Janitor AI and SpicyChat, which have had outages and price changes covered in their own reviews but nothing that meets the bar above. A rumour that Grok Companions were shut down is addressed in the 2026 section: they were not. If you have a company notice for any of these, or for a closure that is missing, send it through the contact page with the date and I will add the row with credit. Our best AI companion apps list links back here for every platform it ranks, and the statistics page uses this table as its count of closures, so a correction here propagates.