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NOPE
Medium reported severity Product Shutdown

Soulmate AI shutdown: users report grief after losing companion relationships

Soulmate AI closed in September 2023. Euronews described two users grieving their companions. One tried recreating his companion elsewhere with mixed results. The record concerns the shutdown and reported emotional consequences; no psychiatric diagnosis is inferred.

AI system
Soulmate AI
Occurred
Sept 2023
Reported
25 September 2023
Event location
Unknown
What the AI did
Communicated with the person
Reported harm
Psychological DistressRelationship Disruption
Whose AI use
Their own AI use
Setting
Relationships · Everyday life
Evidence
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources
3 claims: 3 reported. 3 open questions
People reported harmed
At least 2 people

Reported harm

Users reported grief and the loss of companion relationships.

Outcome

Unknown

Product Shutdown

What remains unknown

  • The two users’ event and residence countries are unknown.
  • The total number harmed and any clinical diagnoses are unknown.
  • Longer-term outcomes and overlap with earlier Replika experiences remain unresolved.

What the evidence supports

AI involvement: reported. Users had sustained conversations with AI companions before the hosting app shut down.

3 claims: 3 reported. What the statuses mean

Reported Euronews reports grief in two users after the September 2023 shutdown of Soulmate AI.

Causal attribution. User-attributed emotional consequences. Bot loss is not a human death.

Reported One user described both satisfaction and difficulties after recreating his companion on another platform.

Causal attribution. Reported partial adaptation, not established recovery.

Reported A contemporaneous professional blog reported grief among users anticipating the announced 30 September closure.

Causal attribution. A professional’s account of online reactions; no independent clinical assessment.

Sources

3 sources inspected. Sources that repeat one account do not corroborate each other.

How the sources were read, and where the events happened

English article body inspected through the web reader (L618-L691). Direct HTTP request returned 406. Interview and a described Reddit video; the original video was not inspected. Applies to s1.

English dated post read directly. Contemporary observation of user reactions and announcement, not clinical verification or an affected-person census. Applies to s2.

English university account read directly. Event-specific research context; participants may overlap other sources and the sample is not a harmed-person count. Applies to s3.

Event countries: Unknown. Affected-person countries: Unknown. Court countries: Unknown.

The inspected accounts do not locate the two users. The provider’s Florida base does not establish their locations.

Reviewed for publication 2026-09-25: Concrete adverse experience with a core person relation. Claims remain attributed to their sources. Technical and causal limits are recorded.

People reported harmed in this case

At least 2 people

2 AI participants · 0 other people harmed

Additional affected people are described without a reliable count.

Two individually described grieving users in Euronews. Additional reactions remain unquantified. Downloads, bots, forum posts and the later 60-person study sample are not counted.

Counted once within this case. The same person may appear in other cases. This count does not establish AI causation.

Cite this case

Compiled per our published methodology: verification statuses, sourcing standards, and corrections process.

APA

NOPE. (2026). Soulmate AI shutdown: users report grief after losing companion relationships. AI incidents. https://nope.net/incidents/2023-soulmate-ai-shutdown-grief

BibTeX

@misc{2023_soulmate_ai_shutdown_grief,
  title = {Soulmate AI shutdown: users report grief after losing companion relationships},
  author = {NOPE},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {AI incidents},
  url = {https://nope.net/incidents/2023-soulmate-ai-shutdown-grief}
}

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