China Issues Draft Rules to Police Addiction to Emotional AI Companions

States have long reacted to new mind-altering or habit-forming technologies—Britain’s 1751 Gin Act taxed dispensers to curb addiction, and China limited teenage online gaming to three hours a week in 2021. This draft marks the next turn: governments shifting from censoring content to regulating the affective feedback loops of algorithms. It fits a decades-old Chinese trajectory of embedding surveillance into tech lifecycles (real-name registration 2011, deep-fake audits 2023), but now extends sovereignty into citizens’ inner emotional terrain. Whether the rules genuinely safeguard mental health or simply expand state monitoring, they pioneer a model others (California’s SB-243 hints at this) may copy. On a 100-year horizon, these early statutes could become the emotional-safety equivalent of the 19th-century factory acts—setting foundational labor rules for a new class of “machine relationships,” or, if enforcement proves impossible, a cautionary footnote about the limits of paternalistic tech governance.