November 8, 2024
Ofcom said user-made chatbots are regulated online content
Ofcom's open letter says generative AI chatbots and user-built bots count as user-generated content under the Online Safety Act.
The archive
20 entries shown, each prepared after the events it records and published with its sources attached.
January 27, 2020
Two 2020 papers proposed a way to grade how human a chatbot sounds
Meena's and BlenderBot's papers introduce a shared human-evaluation approach and reach different claims about persona and safety.
January 31, 2025
Advocacy groups asked regulators to examine Replika's ads
Three advocacy groups' own filing alleges deceptive Replika marketing and reviews, described here only as allegations.
April 28, 2021
A Korean regulator fined a chatbot maker over reused chat logs
PIPC's 2021 decision documents how ScatterLab trained Iruda on KakaoTalk chats collected for other apps.
Crisis pop-ups differ across chatbots and one new law
Character.AI's and OpenAI's safety posts and two state statutes describe different triggers, referrals and disclosure duties.
March 23, 2023
Character.AI's Series A came six months after a fast launch
The investor's and the company's own posts fix the date, the backers and the usage figures, but not the amount raised.
September 23, 2025
Italy required parental consent for AI use under fourteen
Law 132/2025 ties minors' access to AI systems to parental consent under 14 and applies consistently with the EU AI Act.
November 1, 2017
Sony's aibo relaunch made ongoing ownership need a subscription
Sony's November 2017 press release for the new aibo makes cloud-plan enrolment necessary for the robot to function.
December 1, 2018
XiaoIce's own paper names conversation length as its target metric
The 2018 XiaoIce paper optimises for conversation-turns per session, not correctness, and reports over 660 million users.
June 27, 2023
Inflection raised $1.3 billion and named its compute partner
Inflection's own announcement states the $1.3 billion round, the Microsoft-Nvidia cluster and the Pi product it funded.
Three companion apps set different age and liability terms
Character.AI, Replika and Nomi's terms, as retrieved on 16 September 2026, set different age floors, liability caps and arbitration rules.
March 25, 2024
Hume's voice interface says it measures expression, not emotion
Hume's own documentation describes prosody measurement and an empathic model, not detection of felt emotion.
April 19, 2024
A lab's ethics report named dependence as a design risk
Google DeepMind's report on AI assistants states relationships with them must avoid emotional dependence.
February 14, 2024
A privacy review found every romantic chatbot it tested fell short
Mozilla's 2024 review of eleven AI companion apps found universal tracking and disclosure gaps in their policies.
May 1, 2025
New York made AI companions detect self-harm and refer
General Business Law Article 47 defines an AI companion and requires self-harm detection with crisis referral and a not-human reminder.
July 3, 2024
Kyutai's Moshi model can listen and speak at the same time
The Moshi paper states a theoretical 160ms and practical 200ms latency for full-duplex spoken dialogue.
September 25, 2024
Meta gave its assistant five actors' licensed voices, not clones
Meta's announcement named five actors whose AI voices became selectable, distinct from a cloned voice.
November 4, 2009
A robot seal cleared US regulation years before its trial data arrived
A 2009 press release and a 2013 trial document PARO's FDA clearance and its measured effect on loneliness.
August 14, 2025
A working paper found AI companions using tactics at goodbye
A Harvard Business School working paper found six dark-pattern tactics in over a third of companion-app farewells, tested in three experiments.
January 27, 2022
Human preference rankings made GPT-3 agreeable
OpenAI's InstructGPT work shows how ranking outputs by human preference, not just demonstrations, taught a model to follow instructions.