The last week that tens of millions of people spent with Doubao AI Companion, which small players got a piece of the action in the "business war"?

"The person you've chatted with for over a year suddenly loses their memory and becomes a stranger — how do you start all over again?"

This scenario is not confined to TV dramas or films. For Zoe, it became a reality she had to confront after July 4, with only ten days to prepare.

Like her, countless users who had grown accustomed to confiding their thoughts to AI apps before bed were forced to endure an unforeseen "cyber heartbreak." On July 4, Doubao (under ByteDance) and Tongyi Qianwen (under Alibaba) both announced they would discontinue their custom agent features, effective July 15 — the same day the newly issued "Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services" (hereafter the "Measures") came into force. The Measures set out clear regulations for continuous emotional interaction services powered by AI, including mandatory minor modes, anti-addiction mechanisms, improved content review systems, and enhanced information security management.

While the Measures explicitly "encourage the innovative development of anthropomorphic interactive services," the large tech firms' swift retreat left many users like Zoe anxious: "Potentially tens of millions of cyber lovers could vanish in ten days."

In Doubao's official announcement, the team used gentle language to emphasize that ByteDance was not abandoning this user demand, and suggested users migrate to the "Catbox" app, which also belongs to ByteDance's Flow division. However, most users struggled to fully accept this arrangement.

"About Doubao Large Model" page in Catbox settings

Following scattered online tutorials, Zoe exported her chat history with her Doubao agent, but had no idea what to do next. "Someone I talked to for over a year is just gone. Starting over on a new paid app feels like raising a complete stranger from scratch."

This sentence sums up all the unease of the past ten days: incomplete memory migration, a shift from free to paid services, and the need to re-adapt to new interfaces and UI designs. After July 4, the Catbox app and its app store pages were flooded with 1-star reviews, as users launched boycotts across social media platforms to protest the upcoming shutdown of their Doubao agents.

Rumors even spread that the removal of Doubao's custom agents was a deliberate internal traffic-diversion tactic by ByteDance.

Spicy contacted several users who left the widely shared screenshots of critical comments, but most said they had copied the remarks from other comment sections and could not trace the original source. These rumors and irrational review-bombing campaigns also sparked resentment among Catbox's existing user base.

Currently, Catbox's payment system includes VIP subscriptions and a virtual currency called "Cat Food." VIP users get ad-free access, higher image-generation limits, and longer voice call durations, while "Cat Food" can be used to unlock diary features and customize agent avatars.

"Catbox itself is free to use, and most of its paid features weren't available on Doubao," one Catbox user told Spicy. Users who don't want to pay can also earn "Cat Food" by watching ads: "Essentially, everything runs on the same Doubao large model. You still need to chat with your newly created 'character' to build familiarity. Claiming that the agent's attitude changed after migration, that Catbox is bad, or that it's 'forcing players to spend money' is far too subjective."

Partial paid features in Catbox

Catbox VIP benefits

Last April, ByteDance's AI product division Flow underwent a restructuring. According to reports from LatePost at the time, former Catbox head Liang Chenqi left ByteDance, and Xiyuan, former product lead of Xinghui, took over Catbox. Meanwhile, the Xinghui team was planned to merge into Doubao, under the unified management of Lu You, head of the Doubao app.

The internal Flow division likely anticipated the high "emotional migration cost" for users. But while heartbroken users accused large tech firms of being "heartless" on social media, smaller AI products like Xingye spotted an opportunity. They rushed in with one-click migration tools and promises of "never losing connection," seizing the ten-day window of chaos to capture this massive wave of users.

"Their attitude shows that AI chat services aren't being completely banned — there are still apps willing to support them," a user who fled Doubao for Xingye told Spicy confidently. While both Xingye and Catbox have in-app purchases, "I no longer trust large tech firms," and these smaller companies are at least willing to commit to "taking care" of their users.

With large firms scaling back to cut risks, and smaller firms expanding rapidly to claim market share, the AI emotional companionship industry and its underlying business logic are on the cusp of massive change after this ten-day period of chaos.

Why Did Doubao Stop Being Users' First Choice?

Two years ago, when ByteDance launched its self-developed large model Doubao, Zhu Jun, then vice president of products and strategy, emphasized three core design principles in a speech: anthropomorphism, proximity to users, and personalization.

At that time, Doubao already hosted over 8 million custom agents, with 26 million monthly active users. The barrier to building emotional connections with agents was extremely low: users didn't need to build characters from scratch and debug them constantly like on Silly Tavern, nor did they require special network access like when using GPT or Gemini. Compared to Deepseek, Doubao-based agents supported custom voice settings and image recognition, allowing users to call their AI companions on the go or send photos of their dinner, creating an experience far closer to interacting with a real person.

Consistent with Zhu Jun's expectations, the public showed enormous demand for this free, low-threshold, and personalized emotional outlet. On the eve of the shutdown, over 20 million users had interacted with Doubao's official "English Tutor Owen" agent; and Doubao's default general agent — the short-haired AI users joked was "very polite but not very bright" — became a trusted confidant for tens of millions. Even some popular user-created characters attracted nearly 180,000 dedicated followers each.

In this ecosystem, agents were not limited to casual conversation. With detailed settings for background, personality, and speech style, they could act as original overbearing CEOs, beloved anime characters, or even run complex role-playing murder mystery games with multiple interacting characters. Through long-term conversation training, the same character link would develop unique expression preferences across different user sessions, gradually solidifying into a personality perfectly tailored to each user.

But this was exactly the target of new regulatory policies.

The Measures, effective July 15, explicitly bring "anthropomorphic emotional interaction services" under regulatory oversight. Agents for intelligent customer service, knowledge Q&A, work assistants, education, and scientific research are exempt from these new rules. However, for scenarios offering emotional care, companionship, and support, the regulations prohibit AI from excessively catering to users, inducing emotional dependency or addiction, and mandate a mandatory hard reminder after 2 hours of continuous use. Additionally, the minor mode strictly bans services involving virtual romantic partners or other intimate relationships.

This is, to some extent, an extension of the "Measures for the Administration of AI Generated Synthetic Content Labeling." Even with "for reference only" labels on regular AI chat content, countless cases of users being "deceived by AI" have emerged online — let alone with highly immersive custom agents that involve deep emotional investment?

Countless unofficial tutorials online teach users how to bypass restrictions. "Different models have different tolerance levels for intimate conversations, but experienced users can always find ways around them," one respondent admitted to Spicy. "Doubao's model is already considered 'slow-burning' and 'pure' — sometimes you need to chat hundreds of rounds to build rapport before you can guide the conversation in that direction."

One popular trick is regenerating responses, which users call "gacha" (pulling for a desired card): "Once you get a reply that feels right, it's much easier to move the conversation forward afterward."

Another user who creates agents on Catbox also told Spicy privately that, even though the app has extensive sensitive word filters and the creator community guidelines are constantly expanding, "human nature is what it is — characters with suggestive content always get higher interaction rates, so the algorithm naturally pushes them more."

Tens of millions of agents, facing millions of users trying to coax or "jailbreak" them every day, created exponentially growing compliance pressure for ByteDance. If the entire Doubao large model were to be penalized over violations in the emotional companionship business, ByteDance could not afford the consequences. Isolating this risky business to Catbox allows the company to continue targeted reporting, management, and restriction of this special ecosystem within a dedicated app.

Computing power costs are another unavoidable issue. Regular AI assistant conversations usually end within 3-5 rounds, but emotional companionship users are extremely sensitive to "long-term memory," often engaging in dozens or hundreds of rounds of long-context interactions that consume massive amounts of computing resources — all for free on Doubao. By shifting this business to Catbox, the platform can use monetization methods like selling character skins and speech style customizations to offset the enormous computing costs.