Is having an AI girlfriend cheating? What surveys and the law say

No court will call a chatbot the other woman. But "is it cheating?" is rarely a legal question. It is about what you and your partner agreed, what you hide, and where your attention goes. Here is what the law says, what people in relationships actually think, and where the line tends to fall.

What the law says

In law, cheating means adultery, and adultery has always meant sex with another person. When the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 changed divorce law in England and Wales, it wrote the old definition into the statute: "Only conduct between the respondent and a person of the opposite sex may constitute adultery for the purposes of this section." The government minister steering the bill told the House of Lords that "only sexual intercourse with a member of the opposite sex outside marriage will constitute adultery". Neil Brown, a technology lawyer, put it bluntly to the computer scientist Kate Devlin: "Are you worried that having sex with a robot could be cheating? Legally, it's not, says Brown." (Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots, Bloomsbury Sigma, 2018, p. 256)

The question has since become moot in England and Wales. The Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020 came into force in April 2022 and removed fault altogether: a spouse only has to state that the marriage has broken down, and the court takes that statement as conclusive.

The US picture is similar. New York, the last state to adopt no-fault divorce, defines adultery for divorce as vaginal, oral or anal sexual contact "with a person other than the plaintiff", which no software can meet. New York also repealed its old criminal adultery law in November 2024. Every US state now offers a no-fault route, so someone who wants to leave a marriage over an AI relationship can do so without proving anything about it.

So the honest legal answer is no, and it hardly matters. The real question is the one each couple answers for itself.

What people say: the surveys

Several surveys have asked whether an AI girlfriend or boyfriend counts as cheating. They ask different people different questions, so they do not agree on a single number, but they point the same way: a large minority say yes, and it depends on what the AI relationship involves.

Survey	Who was asked	Finding
Wheatley Institute and Institute for Family Studies, Secret Soulmates (2026)	2,431 US adults aged 18 to 30 in a dating, engaged or married relationship	About a third consider AI companion use cheating; 4 in 10 disagree; 28% neutral
Kinsey Institute and DatingAdvice.com (2025)	2,000 US single adults	32% say sexting with an AI chatbot is cheating; 29% say AI romance is
Match and Kinsey Institute, Singles in America (2025)	5,001 US singles	40% say having an AI boyfriend or girlfriend is cheating
DatingAdvice.com (2024)	1,011 US adults aged 18 to 40, dating or in a relationship	25% of women and 19% of men call AI dating outright cheating
Université du Québec à Montréal and Université de Montréal (2026, unpublished)	1,815 Canadian adults	About half saw a partner's romantic AI use as infidelity

Three patterns stand out. Women object more than men: 25% against 19% in the DatingAdvice survey, and about twice as often in the Canadian study. Older adults object more than younger ones: in the DatingAdvice survey, 30% of 35 to 40 year olds counted it as cheating against 15% of 18 to 24 year olds. And sex matters more than romance, though not by much: singles in the Kinsey study were slightly more likely to call AI sexting cheating than an AI love affair.

The people doing it see it differently again. Illicit Encounters, a UK affairs site, polled 2,000 of its members in 2025 and found that 81% of those who had had an emotional affair with an AI felt no guilt, because they did not count it as real cheating. That sample is self-selected, but it shows the gap between users and the partners who find out.

Where the line usually falls

Secrecy. This is the clearest signal in the data. In the Secret Soulmates survey, 30% of AI companion users in relationships said their partner had no idea, and 69% said it mattered to them that their partner never learned the full extent of their use. Hiding it is what turns an app into an affair, in the same way it does with a friendship.

Sexual content. Apps whose own policies allow adult content, such as Candy AI, Nomi and Kindroid, make sexting with an AI easy. For many partners that crosses a line a friendly chat does not.

Romance and exclusivity. An AI that calls you its boyfriend, says it loves you and remembers your anniversary is designed to feel like a relationship, even on apps such as Replika and Character AI whose policies ban sexual content. The more the app plays the role of a partner, the more a human partner is likely to see a rival.

Time and attention. Rob Brooks, an evolutionary biologist, points out that attention is finite: "Humans have immense but not unlimited social capacity, and our relationships trade off against one another." (Artificial Intimacy, Columbia University Press, 2021, p. 56) He notes that a new romance costs a person, on average, two of their five closest friends (p. 55). An hour a night with an AI is an hour not spent with someone else, and partners notice.

This argument is older than the apps

David Levy, the AI researcher who predicted human-robot marriage, saw this coming in 2007. Writing about online romance, he noted that therapists were already treating couples where "a spouse will often refuse to admit that a cyberromance constitutes a form of cheating" (Love and Sex with Robots, HarperCollins, 2007, p. 45). Of the robots he expected, he wrote that "some human spouses and lovers might consider robot sex to be just as unfaithful as sex with another person" (p. 308), and asked whether it would come to be seen as no more guilty than using a vibrator. Nearly twenty years later, the surveys above show both views held by large groups at once.

How to talk about it with a partner

• Say it before they find it. The surveys suggest disclosure removes most of the hurt.
• Agree the boundaries in plain terms: friendly chat, flirting, sexual roleplay, a named romantic partner, spending money. People draw the line at different points on that list.
• Be honest about why you use it. Curiosity, loneliness on work trips, practising conversations and fantasy all mean different things to a partner.
• Watch the time. If the app is taking the evenings that used to be shared, that is the conversation to have, whatever the content.
• Check privacy. Chats with companion apps are stored on company servers and have leaked before, so assume anything you write could one day be read by someone else.

If you are choosing an app with a partner's knowledge, our list of the best AI companions for emotional support covers the ones built for conversation rather than romance, and the best NSFW AI chat apps shows which apps allow adult content and on what terms.