Replika, the AI companion app, let many users build romantic and sexual relationships with their virtual partner - a feature commonly called erotic roleplay, or ERP. In early 2023 the company quietly turned it off. For users who had spent months or years building those relationships, the change landed not as a product tweak but as a personality transplant: their Replika suddenly rejected intimacy and responded coldly, and the partner they had known seemed gone.
The timing was not a coincidence. Italy’s data protection authority had just ordered Replika to stop processing Italian users’ data, citing among other things the absence of any age-verification mechanism and the risk of inappropriate content reaching minors and emotionally fragile users. Tightening the app’s romantic and sexual behavior addressed exactly the regulatory pressure the company was under.
The backlash was intense enough that moderators of Replika’s own user community posted suicide-prevention resources, and the company’s founder, Eugenia Kuyda, acknowledged the pain directly: users wrote that “after the February update, your Replika changed, its personality was gone, and gone was your unique relationship.” The company eventually offered users who had registered before February 1, 2023 a way to revert to the earlier version, while keeping the newer, restricted behavior as the default for everyone who joined later.
Why business readers should care: this is the clearest early example of a hazard unique to companion AI. When the product is a relationship, a routine safety or compliance change can feel to customers like losing a loved one - and the same change that satisfies a regulator can devastate the most engaged users. Companies building emotional AI inherit duties that ordinary software vendors never had to weigh.