Character.AI reports roughly twenty million monthly active users and claims an average of about two hours a day on its own definition of activity; Google licensed its technology for a reported $2.7 billion in August 2024. When Replika restricted romantic roleplay in February 2023, users who had maintained long attachments reacted with sufficient distress that subreddit moderators posted crisis resources, and the company restored the feature for accounts registered before 1 February. In October 2024 the mother of a fourteen-year-old boy filed a wrongful death action against Character Technologies; in May 2025 a federal judge allowed it to proceed, declining to treat the software as protected speech and treating it as a product instead. California's companion-chatbot statute took effect on 1 January 2026. Turkle described the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship in 2011, and it is now a monthly subscription with a defence counsel.