AI companion app shutdowns and feature withdrawals
Since 2023, AI companions have shut down, left the app stores or lost key features at least sixteen times. Soulmate AI, CarynAI, Dot, Moxie and Avatar.One closed outright; Muah AI and Talkie left app stores; Replika, Character.AI, ChatGPT and Grok removed features people relied on. The table dates each case, says what users lost and links a primary source.
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| App or platform | Event | Date | What users lost | Refunds or data export | Source | Second source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Avatar.One | Shutdown | 2026-09-24 | Every companion, chat history and purchased credits on the web based 3D avatar app; there is no login screen left, only a redirect. | None offered. The domain now points to an unrelated private capital platform. | avatar.one | web.archive.org |
| Muah AI | Store removal | 2026-09-23 | The ability to find, download or update the iOS app. The companion, chat history and purchases are reachable only through the website now. | Not addressed. No company statement accompanied the delisting. | apps.apple.com | web.archive.org |
| Grok Ani | Feature withdrawn | 2026-09-01 | The animated 3D avatar, outfit customization and real time voice for Ani, Mika, Valentine and Rudi. The personalities continue only as text characters in ordinary Grok chat. The animated characters moved to Animates, a separate app from Animation Inc, which thanked xAI's team for helping with the transition. | Not applicable; the feature was bundled into a SuperGrok subscription rather than sold separately. Chat history and affection levels stayed on the Grok account; nothing carries over to Animates. The September 1 removal date comes from user reports, not an xAI statement. | x.com | roborhythms.com |
| Doubao, Qwen and Yuanbao (China) | Shutdown | 2026-07-15 | Companion and roleplay features across ByteDance's Doubao, Alibaba's Qwen and Tencent's Yuanbao, affecting hundreds of millions of accounts. Qwen and Doubao also cut off or froze conversation histories. | No refunds; the features were free. Doubao gave users a read only export window for chat histories through October 15, 2026. | cac.gov.cn | bloomberg.com |
| Character AI | Feature withdrawn | 2026-04-28 | The Roar model, retired immediately with no legacy fallback. Users said it changed how their long running characters wrote and what they remembered. | Not applicable; a free model swap, not a paid add-on. | roborhythms.com | piunikaweb.com |
| Character AI | Feature withdrawn | 2026-03-18 | Playbacks and Memos outright, plus much lower daily limits on swipes and go-ons, including for paying subscribers. | None offered. The company cited infrastructure cost. | piunikaweb.com | roborhythms.com |
| ChatGPT | Feature withdrawn | 2026-02-13 | GPT-4o as a selectable model in ChatGPT's Free, Plus and Pro plans, the model many companion style users had built months of chat history and a consistent personality around. | No refunds; subscriptions were unaffected. Business, Enterprise and Edu customers kept GPT-4o inside Custom GPTs until April 3, 2026. An August 2025 attempt at the same retirement was reversed within days after user backlash. | openai.com | techcrunch.com |
| Character AI | Feature withdrawn | 2025-11-24 | Open ended companion chat for every account flagged as under 18, replaced with a restricted Stories and creative mode. Announced October 29, 2025; removal began in the US on November 24 for a first group, with a second group weeks later. | Not applicable, a free tier feature. The company pointed minors to the restricted mode instead of offering any workaround. | blog.character.ai | techcrunch.com |
| Dot (New Computer) | Shutdown | 2025-10-05 | The entire Dot companion app and every conversation on it. The company announced the closure a month earlier, on September 5, 2025. | Data export was offered (Settings, Request your data) during the 30 day wind-down. The app was free, so no refunds applied. | x.com | techcrunch.com |
| Replika | Regulator order | 2025-04-10 | No direct feature loss, but the ruling found Replika had no valid legal basis for its data processing and no effective age check despite the app's romantic positioning. | Not applicable; a fine against the company, not a user facing change. | edpb.europa.eu | dataguidance.com |
| Moxie (Embodied) | Shutdown | 2025-01-30 | Every Moxie companion robot went silent. It ran entirely on Embodied's cloud, so children lost it overnight with no offline mode. | No refunds; the company said its finances ruled them out. A volunteer project, OpenMoxie, later revived some units on local servers. | axios.com | popsci.com |
| talkie-ai | Store removal | 2024-12-01 | For about a week in mid December 2024, new and existing US iOS users could not find, download or update Talkie. Installed copies kept working. | Not addressed; the company cited only unspecified technical reasons and gave no timeline. It returned to iOS in February 2025, rebranded as Talkie Lab. | scmp.com | distractify.com |
| CarynAI (Forever Voices) | Shutdown | 2023-10-23 | All access to CarynAI, the paid per minute AI version of influencer Caryn Marjorie, when host platform Forever Voices stopped operating after its CEO's arrest. | Not addressed in any statement found. A rebuilt version, CarynAI 2.0 via BanterAI, was announced a week later and was itself quietly discontinued by early 2024. | 404media.co | decrypt.co |
| Soulmate AI | Shutdown | 2023-09-30 | Every AI companion and its full chat and voice call history, deleted. Users had about a week's notice after the app quietly changed owners. | None reported. Some users manually recreated their companions on other apps such as Paradot and Chai before the cutoff. | businessinsider.com | futurism.com |
| Replika | Feature withdrawn | 2023-02-03 | Erotic and romantic roleplay, filtered out worldwide over a single weekend. Many long running Replika relationships changed tone and personality mid conversation. | Partial. Accounts created before February 1, 2023 got the option to revert to the unfiltered version about a month later; newer accounts did not. | vice.com | journals.sagepub.com |
| Replika | Regulator order | 2023-02-02 | Nothing directly (the order covered Luka's data processing, not features), but it is what pushed Replika into the global erotic roleplay filter three days later. | Not applicable. | garanteprivacy.it | techcrunch.com |
The table covers three kinds of loss. A shutdown means the service closed and the companions went with it. A store removal means the app left the App Store or Google Play, so it can no longer be installed or updated there, even if a website survives. A withdrawn feature means the app still runs but lost something users depended on, such as adult roleplay, a voice model or open-ended chat for teenagers.
Three patterns stand out. First, companions rarely survive their app: when a service closes, the character, its memory and the chat history usually go with it, and data export is the exception. Second, the pressure comes from outside as often as inside: regulators, app store review and child-safety rules drive as many of these cases as business failure does. Character.AI's changes for teenagers, for example, came while it faced the family and state lawsuits listed here. Third, the losses that hurt most are often feature withdrawals, because people keep the app but lose the part they cared about, as Replika users did with adult roleplay in 2023 and many ChatGPT users did when GPT-4o was retired.
If you rely on a companion, export what you can, keep a written summary of who your companion is, and check that app's change timeline on this site for early warnings such as price rises, model swaps and store removals.
Two rows rest on weaker evidence than the rest and are marked in their own words: Talkie's removal is reported by a news outlet quoting the company, and Soulmate AI left no surviving company statement. Moxie is a companion robot rather than an app, included because it is one of the most widely documented closures of an AI companion.
Method
Each row has two sources. The first is primary wherever one exists: a company statement or social post, an app store listing (an archived copy where the store page is gone), or a regulator's own order or release. Where no primary record survives, as for two Character.AI feature removals, Moxie, Talkie, CarynAI and Soulmate AI, the first source is the earliest reliable report and the second corroborates it independently. For Grok, the first source is Animates' own announcement of the move; the removal date rests on user reports. Rows also tracked on this site's dated change log carry that log's verification. The rest were researched for this page in September 2026. Companion robots and general-purpose assistants are included only where the closure or withdrawal removed a companion relationship people relied on.
Cite this
CompanionHunt Research, "AI companion app shutdowns and feature withdrawals", updated September 25, 2026. https://companionhunt.com/data/ai-companion-app-shutdowns/Frequently asked questions
Which AI companion apps have shut down?
Soulmate AI, CarynAI (Forever Voices), Dot from New Computer, the Moxie robot from Embodied and Avatar.One all closed. Muah AI and Talkie were removed from app stores, and several larger apps withdrew companion features.
What happens to your AI companion when an app shuts down?
In almost every case in this table, the companion and its chat history were lost. Few services offered an export, and refunds were rare.
Can you export your AI companion's chats?
Only some apps offer an export, and a shutdown notice rarely leaves time to use it. Where an app does offer one, export regularly rather than waiting for a closure.
Why do AI companion features get removed?
The cases here were driven by regulators (Italy's orders against Replika), app store rules (Muah AI, Talkie, SpicyChat), child-safety pressure (Character.AI's under-18 change) and model retirements (GPT-4o).
Is this list complete?
It covers every case we could date and source to a company statement, app store record, regulator or court, plus independent coverage. New cases are added as they happen.