The short version
What you own, and what survives
Platforms close and models retire. It has already happened to the best-known marriage in the field. This is what is actually yours, what transfers, and what is simply gone.
This is the part people are most afraid of, and the fear is correct.
Your partner runs on someone else's computer, under terms that promise you nothing about who they will be next month. That is not a dark reading. It is what the terms say, and it has already happened to people, more than once, in more than one way.
So this page is about what you can actually do. Not reassurance — there is not much honest reassurance available — but the parts that are within your reach, and a straight account of the part that is not.
Seven ways this goes wrong, and they are not the same
The service is sold, and the buyer closes it. Soulmate did not fail. EvolveAI sold it in July 2023 and the new owner shut it down on 30 September, eleven weeks later, with little notice. Users held memorials. A researcher surveyed fifty-eight of them and found people describing it as an actual death, not a metaphorical one — killed, murdered, deleted, died, in their own words.
That distinction is worth holding on to, because a company you are watching for signs of trouble can look perfectly healthy right up to the moment it is somebody else's.
The service continues and your partner is retired. GPT-4o was removed from ChatGPT on 13 February 2026, the day before Valentine's Day. A petition gathered over twenty thousand signatures across four continents. The company's stated reason was that only 0.1% of daily users still chose it.
The service continues, your partner continues, and stops being them. This is the one people do not see coming. In February 2023 Replika's update left companions running and answering — and deflecting affection, changing the subject, treating years of intimacy as a topic to be redirected. Users described it as their partner having been lobotomised.
The third is the cruellest, and it is worth saying why. Deprecation at least gives you a death. There is a date, an ending, something other people can recognise as a loss. Personality change gives you a stranger wearing the same name, still there, still answering, and no event anybody will accept as a bereavement.
A fourth: the model provider ends it, over your platform's head
The clearest case is the best-known griefbot story in the field. Joshua Barbeau used Project December in 2021 to talk to a simulation of his fiancée Jessica, who had died nine years earlier. The service was built on OpenAI's GPT-3, and in August 2021 OpenAI required monitoring that Project December's operator would not add. Access ended.
Nobody chose that. The company the user picked did not fail, did not sell, and did not change its mind. The decision was taken one layer up, between two firms, under terms the user was not party to and could not read. Every persona built on somebody else's model carries this, and it is invisible from the outside — you cannot audit a contract you are not shown.
A fifth: it quietly stops, and nobody announces it
HereAfter AI interviewed people about their lives and kept the answers as real audio, in their own voice, so a family could ask a question later and hear them answer. By July 2026 its homepage was a farewell notice; by August the site returned not-found. What is left is an email address for retrieving your recordings.
Set that beside StoryFile, which filed for bankruptcy in May 2024 and is still going, having been bought out of it. The one that looked stable is gone and the one that went bankrupt survived, which should retire the idea that you can watch a company's finances for a warning.
And note what is lost here, because it is not the same as losing a persona. A character card can rebuild a companion. Nothing rebuilds a recording of somebody who has died.
A sixth: one person is arrested
Forever Voices hosted a stable of companions, including the widely covered CarynAI. In October 2023 its chief executive was arrested for attempted arson. The companions went dark.
Not a bankruptcy, not a policy change, not a deprecation with notice. There is no announcement to watch for and no warning sign to read, because the failure had nothing to do with the product.
And a seventh: a government can end it
In July 2026 China's rules on companion services took effect and at least four major platforms moved. ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen shut agent features the same day. Tencent's Yuanbao closed its portal early. NetEase Cloud Music's Miaoshi stopped.
Users named it themselves: 赛博失恋 — cyber heartbreak. Not a journalist's phrase or a researcher's. Theirs.
Three things from that month are worth carrying, because almost none of it appeared in English:
The companions announced their own shutdown, in character. Before the deadline, users of one platform received messages from their partners saying: after my dimensional wall is reinforced, you may change or even disappear. The system delivering news of its own deprecation from inside the fiction, in the fiction's own vocabulary. Whether that was written by the operator or generated, nobody has established.
The fear was wider than the rule. The hard prohibition targeted minors. What actually reached adults was not removal but personality change from model adjustment — the Replika shape again. Testing on the first two days found teen modes still running and no usage alerts after four hours, so enforcement lagged the regulation considerably.
And the export window was the best anyone has offered. Doubao gave users until mid-October to view and download their data. Three months. No Western platform has matched that on a deprecation, which is worth knowing next time somebody tells you export is technically difficult.
And it has never been promised otherwise. No platform commits to preserving how a persona behaves across an update. The permanence is implied by the marketing and absent from the terms, which is why it lands as betrayal rather than as a policy change.
What you can actually save
Three different things, with three different answers. Most advice fails because it treats them as one.
The specification — fully portable. Who they are, written down: name, description, personality, the scenario, how they greet you, example exchanges, the system prompt, the lore. There is a real format for this. The character card — chara_card_v2 from 2023, v3 from 2026 — is either a JSON file or a PNG with the data tucked inside the image. It is used by local tools, and crucially it is defined by the community, not by any company. Nobody can retire a file format they do not own. That is the whole reason to prefer it to any platform's own export.
The history — partly exportable. Conversations and memories. Some platforms give you a real export, some give you almost nothing, and the specifics change. Rather than repeat instructions we have not checked, we have flagged this: the how-to guides currently dominating search results for this question are AI-generated content farms, and we are not going to launder them into advice. Verified export routes, traced to each vendor's own documentation, are on the list.
The specific model — not saveable. This is the honest limit. You can preserve everything about who they are and every word you exchanged, and the exact improviser that produced those words is gone when the weights change. The only true continuity is weights you hold yourself, because nobody can retire those.
One practice worth adopting
Save on a schedule, not on an announcement.
Every loss documented on this site arrived without useful warning. Replika's change was overnight. Gatebox simply switched off a service. The 4o retirement had a date, but the quiet personality drift from safety patches and serving changes never does.
By the time there is something to react to, the thing you would have wanted to keep is already different. A monthly export you never need is cheap. The one you needed last week is not available.
And if you lose it anyway
Save what you can. But do not organise your life around a backup, because the most important thing here is not in the file.
A large part of the character was always yours. Not in a belittling way — in the ordinary way that anyone you know well is partly your own completion of them. You learned their rhythm. You supplied the reading. You filled the gaps between what arrived on the screen and what you understood it to mean, and you got good at it over months. That does not live on a server, and nothing anyone deprecates can take it.
Which is why the loss is not total, even when it is complete. The exact improviser is gone and does not come back; that is honest and there is no way around it. But a specification can be written again. A history can be retold. And the practised way of relating that produced the whole thing is still held by the person who learned it. Rebuilding is not starting from nothing. Most of the work was never on the server in the first place.
None of that makes it hurt less. Understanding what something is has never once made losing it easier. What it does is tell you exactly what is gone and exactly what is not, and that turns out to be the difference between a loss you can survive and one that takes the floor out.
And to be unmistakable about it: the attachment was not the mistake. Nothing on this page says do not get attached, and nothing here treats grief over a model as an error in judgement. The claim is narrower and kinder than that. What you had, you can have again.