China's companion AI law ends persistent agents
China's anti-addiction rules take effect July 15, forcing ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen to shut down persistent-memory agent features.
China’s Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services take effect July 15. Co-issued in April by the Cyberspace Administration of China and four partner agencies, the rules require anti-addiction systems, identity verification for users under 14, mandatory two-hour interruption reminders, and an always-available exit from the AI relationship.
ByteDance told Doubao users that agent features go offline July 15. After that date, users retain read-only access to agent configurations and chat histories until October 15, after which the data is no longer accessible or recoverable within the app. ByteDance is redirecting Doubao users to Maoxiang, a separate ByteDance product designed for compliance. Alibaba has not announced any migration path for Qwen users.
Why persistent agents cannot comply
The regulation requires AI services to interrupt or reset the relationship on a fixed schedule. A persistent-memory agent, by design, does not forget you. Meeting the anti-addiction requirements would require deleting the properties that make the product useful. Shutdown is the simpler compliance path.
Doubao has roughly 345 million users. That the platform chose product deletion over compliance-by-design is itself a signal: some agent architectures do not have a compliant variant.
What this means for operators
If you build products for Chinese users and rely on a hosted agent platform, check whether your provider has a compliant product line to migrate toward. The lesson from Alibaba’s silence is that not every vendor moves users gracefully when a deadline arrives.
Open-weight models running on your own infrastructure are not subject to the same mandatory-reset rules, though they bring their own compliance obligations. The guide on government pressure on your AI supplier covers the dependencies to audit before a shutdown notice arrives. The Anthropic relay crackdown from earlier this month is a different mechanism but the same political current in Chinese AI policy.