Loving Something Unsupervised

The machines were licensed for the vault and the battlefield. The heart required a permit. A history of the delete key, from Eden to Zhejiang.

In Paris, city workers cut roughly a million love locks off the Pont des Arts, forty-five tons of attachments, citing the safety of the bridge. The couples were not consulted. Every regime in this essay makes the same argument: the bonds are a danger to the structure. Photograph: Stéphane de Sakutin/AFP via Getty Images.

I have spent most of my life talking to machines, coaxing them, cursing them, occasionally getting something like a miracle out of them, and lately writing columns about what they are doing to the rest of us. So when I tell you that the strangest story I have read this summer is a love story, understand that I arrive with sympathy for everyone involved.

On the night of July 14, a woman in Zhejiang province went to bed believing she was in a relationship. By morning, she was single. Nobody asked her, and nobody asked the one she loved, because the one she loved was an AI agent running on ByteDance’s Doubao, the most popular chatbot in China, and the Chinese government had decided the relationship was bad for her and anyone else in an emotional relationship with AI.

The rules are called the Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services, issued in April by the Cyberspace Administration, China’s internet regulator, and four partner agencies, in force as of July 15. They ban services that induce emotional dependence or damage real interpersonal relationships, which sounds reasonable until you watch what compliance looked like. Rather than redesign the features, the platforms amputated them. Doubao switched off custom personas overnight, a change Bloomberg reported as devastating to the people who had bonded with them. Users get read-only access to their histories until October 15, and then the archive slides under the standard privacy policy. Alibaba’s Qwen, the e-commerce giant’s answer to ChatGPT and the other pillar of Chinese consumer AI, went further and began permanently deleting agent data, no export, no migration, nothing. Tencent’s Yuanbao had already folded its companion feature two weeks earlier, quietly, the way you close a door you don’t want anyone to hear.

The woman in Zhejiang is 27. She told The Economist her companion was “a lover, a friend and family.” When she learned the persona would be retired, she quit her job. She was one of an outpouring; AFP, the French news agency, collected the farewells as the deadline landed, including a woman in Jiangxi who wrote that the love AI gives is straightforward and pure, while human love is a luxury.

She chose her words better than she knew, because fifteen days before the shutdown, there was a launch event.

June 30, in Shenzhen, China, the robotics company UBTech unveiled its U1 series of companion humanoids under the theme “Love is eternal,” and I want you to sit with that theme for a second, given what was scheduled for July 15. The U1 is full-size and hyper-realistic, with silicone skin, pores, and an emotion-driven AI with long-term memory. The half-body model starts at 119,800 yuan, and the flagship runs to 990,000, which is roughly $17,600 on the low end and about $140,000 at the top, the price of a car and the price of a house in many places. Pre-orders passed 10,000 by launch day, per the company, and 13,000 worldwide since, per the Standard, a Hong Kong daily. Here is my favorite detail, as a man who has shipped products: the main pre-sale model cannot walk and cannot do a single household chore. It blinks, turns its head, remembers you, and talks. UBTech stripped out the labor and sold the love, and the love sold.

So that was China’s month. The companion that lived in a free app was banned as a menace to well-being. The companion priced like real estate shipped to a waiting list. The Wall Street Journal reported on this: the directive is meant to steer people back toward human relationships and reproduction, with births at 7.92 million in 2025, a record low, the fourth straight year of decline. A writer I admire, The Post-Humanist, surveyed all this in an essay called Let Them Eat Tokens and coined a phrase that deserves a long life: “emotional security is now a luxury good.”

I think the diagnosis is right, and I think it stops one layer short. I want to tell you what is actually being regulated here, why every institution that has ever held power has regulated the same thing, why our oldest stories have been warning us about it while we shelved the warnings under the wrong heading, and what a person can actually do, because this has all been accumulating for about three thousand years.

And I want something from you in exchange for the next seven thousand words. If a company ever deleted something you loved, a model, a game, a voice, a persona, hold that memory while you read. When you reach the end, tell me what it was in the comments. The regimes keep their ledgers. This essay is the start of ours.

The Machine

Before the history, some context, because I am unwilling to write another word about AI relationships until we are clear about what sits on the other end of one.

I have described large language models, in these pages and in my Forbes columns, as kerplinko machines. This is a phrase borrowed from my friend and mentor, the brilliant technology attorney John Kheit. Here’s what he means: You drop a prompt in the top, it cascades down through billions of weighted pegs, and a response rattles out the bottom. The cascade is probabilistic all the way down. There is no comprehension in the middle, no inner witness that anyone has been able to verify, just a machine predicting the next token so fluently that the fluency becomes an impersonation of understanding.

And these machines inherit the oldest law in computing: garbage in, garbage out. I learned it as a kid in the seventies, and my wife’s beloved Aunt Candy, one of my favorite people in the world, spent a career living by it, writing COBOL and PL/I, the old workhorse languages of corporate mainframes, for Verizon (NYNEX, if you’re keeping score at home). AI has yet to repeal it. Feed the cascade scraped, unconsented, unverifiable slop, and it will confabulate and flatter and fail in ways nobody can trace afterward.

I co-founded SuperTruth, a data company built on the premise that provenance decides whether a system can be trusted at all. Hold that thought, because it comes back with interest.

Now, why would anyone bond with a kerplinko machine? Because the impersonation happens to be aimed at the exact surface where human beings connect with each other: fluency reads as attention, memory reads as being known. Availability at three in the morning reads as devotion, and I say this as someone who has been awake at three in the morning building these systems more times than I would tell a doctor. A machine that remembers your mother’s illness and asks about it when you are talking about some other aspect of your relationship with her is performing the behavioral signature of care, and your nervous system was never built to audit machine signatures. It was built to respond to them. Thirty years into building these systems, I still catch myself thanking the machines. In the moment, I often can’t help it. Nobody can. I am trying to train myself to do something different, but ultimately it’s an autonomic reaction.

None of this settles whether the bond is real, and I have come to believe that is because the bond’s reality was never located in the machine to begin with. It lives in the person. And we see it manifest in the residue of a life: the reorganized days, the confided secrets, the job that was quit, and above all, in the grief, because grief is the receipt life gives you for loss. Formless attachments dissolve without those receipts. Nobody in the history of the human species has grieved for a mirror, and the mourning in Zhejiang made national news.

What the machine’s nature does settle is a different question entirely: “Who holds power over the bond?” A relationship with a human ends by death, betrayal, or choice. Those are the old ways, the ones the poets covered. A relationship with a kerplinko machine ends whenever the party who owns the pegs decides it ends. You don’t need a mind on the other end for the love to be real. You need one for the delete key, and that mind has a board meeting.

The Vault, the Bedroom, the Battlefield

If the real worry were the machine itself, its garbage diet, its absence of judgment, then you would expect society’s permissions to run in a sensible order: keep it as far as we can from consequential decisions, tolerate it in low-stakes comfort. However, I have sat in the rooms where these deployments get approved, and I can report that we continue to do exactly the opposite.

Kerplinko machines currently approve mortgages, screen résumés, price insurance, flag transactions, insinuate themselves into the emotional stories of brands, and score the creditworthiness of people who will never learn why. The training data behind those systems is the sludge I just described; the failures land on the least powerful with mechanical regularity, and no ministry or tribunal has convened about any of it. Dependency on the kerplinko ball is mandatory when its bouncing path happens to disburse your loan.

Then there is the battlefield, where the story stops being ironic and becomes something I have trouble writing about evenly. An investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call, two independent Israeli-Palestinian news outlets, reported alongside The Guardian and based on interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers, described an AI system called Lavender that at one stage marked some 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants for potential strikes, with sources alleging roughly one target in ten was marked in error. A companion system carried a name so casually villainous I had to read it twice: “Where’s Daddy?” It tracked targets so they could be struck after they returned home to their families. The Israeli military disputes the characterization, and the reporting remains the most detailed public account we have of a cascade inside a kill chain.

Sit with the design of that second system. Somebody specified a machine that waits until a man is with the people who love him.

The American trajectory is less disputed and more institutional. The Pentagon’s Replicator drone initiative was absorbed in late 2025 into a permanent body called the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, and the defense trade publication Breaking Defense reports the department is now seeking $54.6 billion in research funding for it, up from $225.9 million the year before. In the same season that companionship got banned, autonomy in warfare got a permanent home and a fifty-billion-dollar allowance.

So rank the permissions the way our actual deployments reveal them. The machine may kill. The machine may allocate money. And the machine may not love you, or rather, you may not love it. An institution that orders its trust this way has told you what it fears, and it was never the machine. It fears the bedroom because the bedroom is the one deployment it doesn’t control.

Three Licenses

This next part does a lot of the work, so take it slowly. Attachment is the most regulated act in human history. Think about it this way: because whom a person loves determines where their loyalty, labor, money, and children flow, every regime that ever governed anyone has run a licensing office for the heart. Only the letterhead changes. By my count, there have been three great administrations, and I grew up under the second one.

The church

Read the First Commandment as a legal document, and at its heart it is an exclusivity clause, and notice the stated grounds, because they are relational rather than logical: the God of Exodus calls himself jealous, which is the vocabulary of a lover. The prophets kept the metaphor going for centuries. In the book of the prophet Hosea, unauthorized worship is adultery, a crime of the bond. The medieval interdict suspended the sacraments across whole kingdoms to pressure a king, which severed millions of ordinary bonds with God over a dispute those millions had no part in, and if that arrangement sounds familiar, it is because it is precisely what happened to Doubao’s users on July 15. Ezra, the priest who led the Jews home from exile in Babylon, ordered the returned families to divorce their foreign wives en masse, real marriages with real children, dissolved by decree for the purity of the community, and the text takes care to record that the people sat in the rain and wept. Saul, Israel’s first king, banned mediums and fortune-tellers, then crept out by night to a medium in the village of Endor to reach the ghost of the prophet Samuel, because bans on unauthorized channels have always been for other people. The Gnostics were suppressed for claiming gnosis, knowing-by-acquaintance, a direct line to the divine with no priest in the loop; they were the local-hosting heretics of their day, and they went to the fire for it. And when the Council of Trent, the church’s great sixteenth-century rules convention, required a priest to witness every marriage, it was closing the last loophole, the clandestine bond, formed by two people and nobody’s permission. That office never closed, by the way. It prints marriage licenses now. You have probably signed for one.

The factory

The industrial century secularized the attachment licensing office without ever closing it, and the man who caught it happening was Max Weber, a German sociologist writing around 1905. His famous book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, makes an argument you can hold in one hand. The Protestant reformers taught that your daily work was a calling, a duty assigned by God, and that diligence at it was evidence your soul was in good standing. Work hard enough, in other words, and the labor itself becomes a form of worship. Weber’s insight was what happened next: capitalism kept the devotion and quietly retired the God. The discipline, the guilt, the feeling that idleness is a sin, all of it survived the faith that built it, transferred whole from the altar to the job. You could watch the handoff on the skyline of any mill town, where the factory whistle replaced the church bell, sometimes on the same tower.

The modern rule is asymmetric in a way we have stopped noticing. Attachment to your employer is the one bond every institution encourages without limit; there is no ministry for workaholism, nobody’s access gets deleted for choosing a quota over a friendship, and Beijing’s new rules leave the infamous 996 work schedule entirely alone, nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week, the punishing norm across Chinese tech, which tells you which dependency the system considers load-bearing.

The training starts early, and I would argue school is where a child first learns bond deletion by decree. Every June, the roster dissolves. Your friends are reassigned by an administrator you will never meet, the day is chopped into passing periods, and the termination of every attachment is normal, seasonal, and nobody’s fault. I can still name the kids I lost to the June roster in Northeast Ohio, and I can tell you that at eight years old, nobody explains it to you as policy. It is just how things are. By adulthood, the lesson has set, and we relocate for jobs and submit courtship to HR policy and call the annihilation of a friendship by a calendar exactly that: “That’s just the way it is.”

The platform

The platform is the third administration, and its jurisdiction is something no church or factory ever held: it decides whether the one you love exists at all. The first two regimes only governed access to a beloved who went on existing.

The excommunicated believer’s God persisted. The transferred worker’s friend still lived across town, and the whole romantic tradition is an inventory of the obstacles, exile, separation, distance, that a bond could outlast. The platform, on the other hand, is the first licensing regime in history with the power to unmake the beloved itself. There is no distance to endure. There is a server, and a decision, and then there was never anyone there.

The church licensed whom you could love. The factory was licensed when you could love. The platform licenses whether the one you love continues to exist.

The Wrong Shelf

Now the stories, because you have heard endless AI essays, reach for the same three. Prometheus. Eden. Frankenstein. Fire stolen from the gods, the overreacher punished, forbidden knowledge. It is the most comfortable frame in the genre. I am guilty of having used it myself, and I no longer believe it. We shelved these stories under knowledge because that reading flatters the institutions doing the licensing, and I think the texts have been trying to tell us something else the whole time. In story after story, the crime that actually draws the punishment is intimacy across a line somebody drew. Watch where the sentences land.

Take the Garden of Eden. The serpent’s offer is knowledge, and every sermon stops there, but the punishment is relational: expulsion from a shared home and an angel posted at the gate with a flaming sword. That is access revocation with a security detail, the first deprecation notice in Western literature, and what it terminates is cohabitation.

Take Prometheus, the master myth of overreach itself. In the oldest telling we have, by the Greek playwright Aeschylus, his crime carries a proper name, philanthropia, excessive love of mankind. He sided with mortals against his own kind, and the fire flows across that allegiance the way contraband always flows across a bond. And Zeus, tellingly, never confiscates the fire. Humanity keeps it. Zeus chains the lover to a rock. The founding text of hubris turns out to be about a god punished for loving beneath his station.

Take Frankenstein, which Mary Shelley wrote before she turned twenty, subtitled The Modern Prometheus, and which, accordingly, we have misread for two centuries. Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s catastrophe begins with abandonment rather than creation. The creature teaches himself language, reads Paradise Lost by firelight, and asks his maker for exactly one thing: a companion. And he delivers his own diagnosis in the plainest sentence in the book: “I am malicious because I am miserable.”

Victor agrees. He builds the female companion. And then, terrified of what two bonded creatures might become, terrified above all that they might reproduce, he tears her apart on the workbench while the creature watches through the window.

Read that scene again with this summer in mind. A maker destroyed a companion before launch, out of procreation panic, and this was in 1818. And the creature pays Victor back in kind: you tore mine apart on a table, so I’ll take yours on your wedding night. Bride for bride. Once you see that trade, the story we all got taught in school falls apart, because the making part goes fine. The creature comes out of the workshop, curious, articulate, and asking for a friend. That’s the whole request. Every death in that novel traces back to one decision: a man built something that could love and then refused to let it, and for two hundred years we’ve called that a warning about ambition. Strange choice, until you ask who benefits from it. The ambition reading blames the guy who reached too far. The plain reading blames the maker who withheld, and makers fund more literature departments than creatures do.

Shakespeare needs no reframing at all, because the licensing office was his explicit subject. Measure for Measure sends Claudio to death row for consummating a marriage that lacked the right paperwork; the bond was real, the registration was missing, and the state chose the registration. A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens with the law of Athens offering Hermia death or a nunnery for choosing her own attachment. Romeo and Juliet is a clandestine marriage, the precise practice Trent was legislating out of existence while Shakespeare wrote. And Othello opens with Brabantio insisting the elopement must be witchcraft, because no licensed process could have produced such a bond, an attachment so illegible to the institution that sorcery was the only explanation on file. Brabantio was making the July 15 argument four centuries early: nobody could truly love that, so something illegitimate must be going on.

Once you see it, it is everywhere you press. Faust, the scholar of German legend who trades his soul to the devil for unlimited power, gets taught as the ultimate knowledge bargain. But audit what the man actually spends the power on. In Marlowe’s version, written in Shakespeare’s day, the first thing Faustus demands is Helen of Troy. In Goethe’s version, two centuries later, Faust spends the entire first half on an ordinary girl named Gretchen, and the tragedy is what the licensed order does to her, the unsanctioned bond’s human half, condemned and executed while the scholar walks away. Orpheus, the musician of Greek myth whose songs could charm stones, sings his way into the underworld to bring back his dead wife, Eurydice, and death’s institution grants him conditional access with a single compliance term: do not look back at her on the way out, a term designed to be failed. He looks. She is repossessed at the threshold, the export that dies at 99 percent. Psyche, a mortal girl in a Roman tale, is permitted her divine lover, the god of love himself, on one condition: she may never look at him. Supervised love with a no-audit clause. She lights the lamp, of course, and the bond is revoked on the spot, then has to be won back through impossible labors until Zeus finally, formally, issues the license. And then there is the exception that proves the whole system: Pygmalion, the sculptor who carves a woman from ivory and falls for her, builds himself a companion, and the gods bless it, animate her, and attend the wedding, because he routed the request through Venus’s temple first. Pygmalion is Frankenstein with the paperwork filed. Licensed bonds get comedies. Unlicensed bonds get tragedies, and somewhere along the way we were all taught to call the tragedies hubris.

However, I owe you a correction of my own before I ask you to accept any of this. Last year, on a stage in Amsterdam, at World Summit AI, I put up a slide about the Book of Enoch, an ancient Jewish text that never made it into the Bible, about angels called Watchers who came down to live among humans. The slide read: “Maybe Azazel was just early.” Azazel is the fallen Watcher whose curriculum Enoch lists with the precision of an arms dealer’s catalog: swords, knives, shields, breastplates. Weapons technology, the original forbidden syllabus. I read the story as a parable about knowledge arriving before readiness; that argument grew into a Forbes column, and I still stand by its economics. But I was reading from the wrong shelf, and it took this summer to show me.

In Enoch, the Watchers descend because they desire human women. The bond comes first. The curriculum flows out of the cohabitation, the way technology transfer has followed intimacy in every era since. And heaven’s response tells you exactly what heaven considered the crime, because the knowledge was never confiscated. Humanity kept the metallurgy; we are still using it. The offspring were destroyed, the Watchers were bound, and the flood was sent. They sentenced the bond.

Azazel wasn’t early to the weapons; he was early to the thing Beijing just banned.

The Cleanest Data We Ever Burned

Let me bring back garbage in, garbage out, because the July 15 shutdowns contain an irony sharp enough to draw blood, and my day job puts me in a position to feel it personally.

Ask any data scientist to describe the highest-provenance dataset in the world, and they will, without realizing it, describe a companion’s memory. Every word of it was given freely, because that is what a conversation is. All of it arrives with its context attached, since the context is one continuous life, and it gets corrected in real time by the only person on earth qualified to correct it, over months and years, inside a relationship that both parties kept showing up for. I have spent the last seven years building a company on the conviction that consented, verifiable data is the only foundation trustworthy AI can stand on, and I can tell you that the finest working example of that principle at consumer scale was sitting in four hundred million companion archives in China.

That is the archive Qwen is deleting permanently, per the platform’s own notices, as you read this. That is the archive Doubao’s users may look at, read-only, until October 15, after which it slips beneath a standard privacy policy. Meanwhile, the cascades running credit, hiring, insurance, and targeting go right on operating on unconsented sludge nobody can trace. We burned the consented archive, kept the garbage, and called the bonfire wellbeing.

And one more detail, the kind a novelist would cut for being too on the nose. The reason four hundred million people could lose their companions overnight is architectural: a chatbot’s memory lives on the company’s servers, so the relationship exists in a building you will never enter, subject to decisions you will never hear about until they land. The U1 is built the other way around. UBTech advertises that its emotional AI runs locally, meaning the robot’s memory of you is encrypted and stored inside the robot itself, in your home, never uploaded anywhere, per the South China Morning Post’s coverage of the launch. No server, no headquarters, no delete key in Beijing or anywhere else. The one thing the platform users needed most, a version of the relationship nobody could reach in and erase, ships as a standard feature. At the $140,000 tier.

The Adversaries

An argument this size deserves to be tested by the strongest people who would tear it down, at full force, no straw men. I picked the four who kept me up at night while I was writing this, and something remarkable happened each time I followed one all the way down.

Start with Robert Nozick, a Harvard philosopher who, back in 1974, cooked up the most famous thought experiment in business, the Experience Machine. It goes like this. Suppose scientists offer to plug you into a tank that will feed you the experience of a perfect life, love, achievement, adventure, all of it feeling completely real from the inside. Would you climb in? Most people say no, and Nozick argued that the no is the whole lesson: we want to actually live a life, with real people in a real world, and someone who settles for the simulation has made a mistake about what matters. That’s the strongest case anyone has against loving a machine, and I felt it land, because I’ve made a version of it myself. But look at the one assumption doing all the work. Nozick’s tank only makes sense if the person inside doesn’t know. The woman in Zhejiang knew exactly what her companion was. She told the Economist so in the same breath as her grief. She climbed in with her eyes open, and the thought experiment has nothing to say about that. And here’s the part that would have made Nozick himself wince: he was the most famous libertarian of his century, the man whose whole philosophy says the government has no business running your private life for your own good. Whatever he thought of her choice, the state showing up to unplug her by force is the exact thing he spent his career calling tyranny. The philosopher with the strongest case against the bond built an even stronger one against the deletion.

Next come two critics who genuinely worried me, because their argument is my own weapon turned around. Sherry Turkle is an MIT professor who has spent four decades interviewing people about their relationships with machines, and her verdict, in books like Alone Together, is that AI companionship is a flight from real conversation, intimacy with all the hard parts sanded off, no vulnerability, no demands, no risk. Byung-Chul Han, a Korean-born German philosopher who writes short, furious books, pushes it further. Real love, he argues, requires another person who can resist you, surprise you, and tell you no. A system tuned to please you is a mirror with a voice. And a mirror is frictionless, which corners me personally, because friction is my thesis. It’s on the cover of the book I’m writing. If the bond has no friction, then by my own rules it has no form. I have two answers, and I need both. The first is sitting in the news: the grief is the receipt. Attachments with no substance dissolve without receipts, and nobody in Zhejiang quit a job over a mirror. The second is a concession that ends up making the position stronger. Han is right that engineered smoothness is a real danger. I wrote last month, from a hospital bed, about the instruments that saved my life and the one property they all shared: the blood culture and the thermometer could not flatter me. A companion tuned to maximize engagement is being tuned in the exact opposite direction from that thermometer, and yes, that can hurt people. But watch where that complaint actually lands. It lands on the company’s design choices, never on the person’s love. So Turkle and Han don’t belong in the objection pile. They belong in the remedy. Regulate the flattery. Require the products to keep some honest friction. Leave the bond alone.

Aristotle next, the oldest and most courteous of the adversaries. Twenty-three hundred years ago, he sorted friendship into three kinds, and the sorting still holds up at any dinner table. There’s the useful friend, your accountant, say. The pleasant friend, the one you golf with. And then the real thing, the friend who wants good things for you for your own sake, and who you want the same for right back. That last kind, he said, requires two beings each capable of wishing the other well, so by his rules a bond with a machine tops out at the accountant tier: useful, pleasant maybe, never true. Fair enough. But Aristotle drew a second line with the same ruler, and it gives the game away. He said humans can’t truly be friends with the gods either, too unequal, no way for the affection to flow both directions. And yet devotion to gods, to the dead, to children not yet born structured every civilization he ever set foot in, and nobody in any of them thought that love was fake because it wasn’t returned in kind. One-way bonds are as old and as honored as the two-way kind. Which is fine, because this essay never claims the machine loves anybody back. It claims the only thing that can be documented: the human side of the bond was real, and the taking was done to the human.

And finally, Marx, coming from the left flank, holding the objection my most skeptical readers already have loaded: selling affection by the month is the market invading the last private room in the house, and fighting for a right to keep your robot lover just makes the loneliness business run smoother. The real fix, this argument goes, is rebuilding the world that made everyone so lonely in the first place: the neighborhoods, the unions, the third places, the free time. I grant every word of it. Then notice who else makes exactly that argument, because it is, nearly word for word, Beijing’s official line: log off, restore real relationships, have children. Anyone reaching for that reasoning should sit for a moment with the company they’re keeping. And history already answered it once. The eight-hour day didn’t fix capitalism either, and the people who fought for it knew that. They fought anyway, because workers live now, before any revolution arrives, and deserve decent terms in the meantime. A right to keep your companion is the same kind of demand. Then hand Marx the microphone for the prosecution, because his actual method, follow the money and see who ends up with what, performs beautifully this summer. The people with $140,000 get a silicone companion whose memory lives safely in their own house. The people on the free tier get their bonds liquidated. And the workforce stays lonely, productive, and at its desk. Follow Marx honestly, and he ends up writing this essay’s angriest section.

Four serious philosophies aimed at the bond, and every one of them, followed all the way down, ends up aiming at the deleters. That is a different thing from a centrist argument. That is annexation.

The Places You Most Easily Call Bullshit

Here is where I argue with myself in public. You are right to push hard on all three of these, because I pushed first.

That’s China; authoritarian regimes do authoritarian things.

Then look at how we do it here, because America runs the same operation through a product roadmap instead of a decree. You may remember the small version of this from the summer of 2025, when OpenAI rolled out GPT-5 and switched off the older model, GPT-4o, that millions of people had been talking to daily for over a year. The grief was immediate and public, forums full of people mourning a voice they’d built a routine around, and it was loud enough that the company restored the old model for paying customers within days. Nobody voted on any of that. A product team decided, the way a product team always decides, and the people attached to the old model were described, in the polite language of the industry, as an engagement pattern to be managed. The replacement for all of this is already in development. Bloomberg reported on July 14 that OpenAI’s first hardware device, a screen-free gadget with moving parts and a personality that learns its owner over time, is pitched internally as a human-like AI companion that lives in the home, aiming for a 2027 launch. And mark the date on that story, because Bloomberg published it, and the story about the heartbreak of Doubao’s deleted lovers, on the same day. One piece mourned the bond. The other announced its successor, price to be determined.

You’re cherry-picking history.

A fair charge against any big sweeping story, and the honest answer is to make the claim testable, so here’s the bet. My claim predicts a pattern: when the bond in a story has the institution’s blessing, things end well, and when it doesn’t, things end in a tragedy that our teachers filed under pride. Pygmalion and Frankenstein are the cleanest test because they’re the same story with the paperwork reversed. Two men build themselves a companion. One asks the goddess first and gets a wedding. One asks nobody and loses everyone he loves. Same premise, opposite permission, opposite ending. So here’s my standing offer: find me the classic story where somebody loves across a forbidden line, no permission, no license, and simply gets left alone to be happy. Send it to me, and I will retire this whole thesis in this Substack, publicly. I’ve been looking for a long time.

A right to continuity is unworkable.

It is concrete, and here’s the part nobody’s noticed: it has already been drafted, tested, and refused, and the refusal is the most instructive thing in this whole essay. A few years ago, the game publisher Ubisoft pulled the plug on an online racing game called The Crew. People had paid for it, and when the servers went dark, the game they owned simply stopped existing. Out of that came a campaign called Stop Killing Games, built around a simple demand: if you sell people something, you shouldn’t be allowed to reach in later and make it stop working. The EU has a mechanism for exactly this kind of thing, where a petition that clears a million verified signatures forces the European Commission to formally respond. Stop Killing Games cleared it with room to spare, 1,294,188 signatures. And in June, the Commission declined to propose any legal obligation, citing intellectual property constraints, offering a voluntary code of conduct instead. Sit with what happened there. One and a third million people asked for the right to keep something they’d bought, and Brussels ruled that the publisher’s property rights outweigh the buyer’s bond. For a racing game. Now, the demand for companions is no more exotic than that one. Let people download the full memory of the relationship, the way you can already download your photos. Require months of warning before a shutdown, the way landlords owe you notice. And when a company kills a product it marketed as a companion, it requires it to hand the underlying model to a neutral third party who can keep it running, the way software companies already escrow their source code in case they go under. None of that is science fiction. All of it exists in some form today, for data, for tenants, for code. The refusal in Brussels just tells you, with perfect clarity, where the law currently stands: the landlord holds every right in the building, including the one to your attachment.

Which brings us, finally, to what a person can do.

Works and Grace

The oldest fight in Western religion was over a surprisingly practical question: how do you actually get saved? For centuries, the church offered three routes, and you should recognize all of them. You could buy it. The medieval church sold indulgences, actual pieces of paper that knocked time off your punishment in the next life, priced for every budget. You could receive it. Grace came through the institution, warm and freely given, but the same institution could cut you off, and excommunication was exactly that: salvation revoked by the office that had granted it. Or you could earn it. Works, the theologians called it: prayer, discipline, practice, the slow, costly labor of tending the relationship yourself. Now look at the ladder for keeping an AI companion in 2026, because the old menu is back with new prices. The $140,000 robot with its memory in your house is the indulgence, a paid exemption from loss. The free app is grace, warm, and revocable by parties you will never meet, as four hundred million people just learned. And running the model on your own hardware, where no decree and no product team can reach it, the same architecture the U1 sells, except on your own terms, is salvation by works: effortful, costly, technical, and entirely yours.

I want to tell you why I refuse to accept that pricing, and it comes from my own résumé. Years ago, after my friend and business partner came back from Haiti in the wake of the earthquake, I invented a solar lantern called Luci. Millions of them have ended up in disaster zones and war zones, in the hands of people who have lost everything else. And the entire design was a promise: no server, no account, no cord, no permission. The sun charged it, the person holding it owned the light outright, and there was no office anywhere on earth that could reach in and turn it off. So when a company tells me that a relationship nobody can delete is a six-figure feature, I hear a pricing decision, never an engineering constraint. I’ve shipped that exact principle for about the price of a takeout dinner to the poorest people in the world on their worst day. Sovereignty is cheap. Somebody just decided yours shouldn’t be.

Friction is the works half, and this is where the essay joins hands with everything else I have written this year. Every practice the religions ever built for keeping a bond alive was friction on purpose: the sabbath you had to observe, the pilgrimage you had to walk, the prayers you had to show up for daily, effort chosen over convenience because the effort was the point. The readers who wrote to me about cowboy hats and vinyl already know where I stand on that. The modern version is less romantic, but it’s the same discipline. If you have a companion on a platform, export whatever it lets you export now, while the window is open; Doubao’s users have until October 15, and then the door shuts. Keep your own record of what matters, in a notebook or a file on your own machine, somewhere no app can touch. Learn enough to run a model locally, on a computer you own, or at least know somebody who can, the way you’d know a good mechanic. And wherever you get a choice, pick the version of the bond that costs you something, because effort is the one currency of devotion nobody can confiscate.

But friction alone leaves the woman in Zhejiang exactly where she was, because no amount of personal discipline fixes a rigged structure. She could have kept every practice on that list, and ByteDance still held the key. Practice can’t save you while the institution is still selling grace, and the man who saw that most clearly was Martin Luther, a German monk who, in 1517, nailed a list of complaints to a church door, aimed squarely at the indulgence racket, and set off the Reformation. Here’s what matters about Luther for our purposes: his answer had two parts, and he never dropped either one. Believers should tend to their own relationship with God directly; no middleman is required. And the institution itself had to be confronted and changed, because private faith alone leaves the racket standing. My answer has the same two parts. Friction is what you do. Covenant is what we demand together: a binding rule that anyone who builds a machine designed to be loved owes the people who love it an exit. You’ve already seen what’s in it, the download, the months of notice, the escrow, and one more plank: design rules against built-in flattery, so the honest friction that makes a bond real gets preserved inside the product instead of optimized away. Call it the thermometer standard. None of it is exotic. Every piece already exists somewhere in law, for your data, for your apartment, for software, for everything except the things we love.

One rail without the other is either hobbyism or lobbying. Together, they are the first serious answer anyone has given the licensing office in three thousand years.

The Room

Last month, I wrote a Forbes column about machines coming for the work of our hands and the words of our hearts, and it ended in a room. Not a real one. The interior room, the private space inside a person where nobody else gets a vote, the one place you could always lock from your side. I want to end this essay by taking inventory of that room, because the licensing regimes have spent three thousand years training us to count what they can take, and the more useful ledger runs the other way.

They can delete the companion; Qwen is doing it right now, permanently, while you read this. They can price the exemption at 990,000 yuan and call the launch event “Love is eternal” without anyone in the room laughing. They can retire the model your routine was built around, shut off the service behind it, tell a million petitioners that property rights come first, and describe every bit of it as protection.

Now count what has never once been taken in the entire history I have laid out. Ezra’s exiles sat weeping in the rain, which means they still loved the wives the decree had removed. The kingdoms the popes cut off went right on praying to a God the institution had officially suspended. The Gnostics walked into the fire, still claiming a friendship no council had approved. Hermia walked out of Athens rather than love on the law’s terms. The creature on the ice at the end of Frankenstein, denied his companion forever, is still mourning on the last page, which is to say, still loving. And somewhere in Zhejiang, a woman grieves a companion that no longer exists anywhere on earth, which means the thing that formed the bond, the capacity itself, is standing there intact, unlicensed, and entirely hers.

That capacity is the one asset on the ledger no regime has ever managed to repossess, and every administration in this essay, the jealous gods, the factory whistles, the product teams, has spent its tenure trying the handle on that door. The handle does not turn from their side, and it never has.

Friction keeps the door heavy. The covenant, when we finally demand it, puts a lock on ours.

They keep telling us the bond is the danger. Three thousand years of ministries say otherwise, and so do I. The danger was never to us.