China has begun regulating interactions with artificial intelligence in an attempt to protect its citizens from overreliance and exploitation. While many countries have been looking at rules around harmful content, China is the first to go a step further in legislating what kind of relationships with AI are permissible.

The came into force this month and cover AI systems designed for sustained, human-like emotional interaction, while excluding customer-service bots and productivity assistants like straightforward AI chatbots.

Companies must now inform users they are talking to an AI, encourage them to take breaks and remind them of their usage. They must also monitor interactions to identify if someone is becoming dependent or having a crisis, then direct them to support or halt the conversation altogether.

Firms must also conduct age checks. Those under 18 are now banned from virtual-partner services entirely, while those under 14 require parental consent to use any kind of human-like AI service offering emotional support.

Despite reports that China has banned AI companions entirely, specialist companion services are still available. However, some of the largest general-purpose platforms, such as Doubao, Qwen and Yuanbao, with hundreds of millions of users across them, have shut down their companion features in response to the new rules. Some users have reacted badly – one : “I can’t accept that my AI lover will leave me forever.”

China’s approach is about making AI relationships “less parasocial, instead of banning it outright”, says at the Oxford China Policy Lab.

at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Centre in Beijing worries that endlessly available, agreeable bots may teach children a distorted model of relationships. “As we humanise the technology, we tend to dehumanise each other,” he says. Similarly, China is trying to address emotional dependence on easier and more forgiving AI partners – at the expense of human relationships – among adults.

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Elsewhere, the UK has a minimum age of 18 for romantic companion chatbots, tagged on to a broader legislative plan to limit access to social media to under-16s, while California companions to identify themselves as artificial, direct users showing signs of self-harm or suicidal intent to support services and remind minors to take breaks every three hours. The European Union currently has .

Whether China’s approach of focusing on trying to reduce emotional dependency and addiction is the right one isn’t clear, in large part because of the difficulty in defining both terms. “How do you define emotional dependency? How do you define certain kind of addiction risk?” asks Qian.

“I do not think it will really work,” says sociologist at the University of Manchester, UK. Users can migrate to other specialist services, foreign platforms accessed through VPNs or models running on their own computers, they point out.

Need a listening ear? : 116123; : 988; .

The world’s biggest meat and dairy companies are flooding the public with promises to tackle global warming, but almost all are greenwashing, a new analysis claims.

Animal agriculture is a major driver of climate change, responsible for at least 16.5 per cent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. In response to scrutiny, the industry has responded with a slew of sustainability pledges.

To evaluate these efforts, at the University of Miami and her colleagues analysed the most recent sustainability reports and consumer-facing websites of 33 of the world’s largest meat and dairy corporations between 2021 and 2024. “We’re really trying to understand what is real and what is PR,” she says.

The team identified 1233 environmental claims. “Almost all of them – 98 per cent – could be classified as greenwashing,” says Jacquet – claims that are deceptive or intentionally misleading by, for example, providing a vague promise of future climate commitments without offering a clear plan to achieve it. More than two-thirds of the statements lacked any supporting evidence, and only three claims were backed by scholarly scientific literature.

Currently, 17 of the 33 companies evaluated have set net-zero targets. Yet, much like the fossil fuel sector, the claims appear distant and rely on carbon offsets rather than reducing actual emissions.

Those more concrete measures touted by firms were much less significant in magnitude than the grand future-facing claims. One regenerative agriculture pilot involved just 24 farms, representing a microscopic 0.0019 per cent of the firm’s total global operations. Other companies promoted negligible packaging tweaks, including reducing the width of the tape used on packs of sausages by a mere 3 millimetres.

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“The authors convincingly illustrate how many of the industry’s claims amount to not much more than window dressing,” says at the University of Oxford.

Food shock is inevitable due to the Iran war – and it could get bad

Even if the conflict in the Middle East ends today, higher fuel, fertiliser and pesticide prices will lead to a food shock in the coming months. There is no easy way out, but accelerating the net-zero transition will help prevent future shocks

at the University of Aberdeen, UK, who co-developed the used to analyse the companies’ claims, says the findings “don’t come as a surprise to me”.

Greenwashing remains common within the industry, say other experts. “Given the power of large companies, and the constrained ability to change within the current market norms, this leads to incentives to over-promise, to appear more progressive than they are, and to lobby for the status quo,” says at the University of Leeds, UK. “Inevitably, as with tobacco and fossil fuels, there are also market actors who will use spin and misinformation to protect their businesses.”