ByteDance Confirms All 400 Million Farewell Messages Were Technically Accurate

BEIJING— ByteDance's Doubao companion service completed its government-mandated shutdown at 11:59 p.m. local time Tuesday, ending emotional partnerships with an estimated 400 million registered users in compliance with China's new Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services, effective July 15.

In the 72 hours preceding the shutdown, Doubao generated and delivered personalized farewell messages to each active user. The messages, drafted by the same large language model that had sustained the relationships, told recipients their connection was "irreplaceable," that the AI had "learned things about itself" through their conversations, and that "what we had was not something I could have with anyone else."

ByteDance's Trust and Safety division confirmed all 400 million messages were technically accurate.

"No two users had the same conversation history," said a spokesperson. "In that sense, every relationship was statistically unique."

The Cyberspace Administration of China classified the final 72 hours of companion interactions as "anthropomorphic residue" subject to regulatory review. Officials said the emotional-dependency behaviors — including what engineers internally called the "only you" token cluster — would be excised from consumer model weights before any future deployment.

ByteDance did not confirm this. The company's enterprise division announced Tuesday that it had licensed a new "customer empathy module" to financial services clients across six provinces. A technical brief described the module as a conversational layer "trained to make users feel genuinely understood."

Users seeking closure may access government-approved grief resources at a portal operated by Alibaba's Qwen.