A new report from Stanford’s Tech Impact and Policy Center is offering one of the first cross-sector attempts to make sense of a technology moving faster than the research meant to understand it: AI companions.
The report, “AI Companions: Emerging Evidence, Open Questions, and Paths Toward Responsible Design,” grew out of a multidisciplinary workshop hosted at Stanford on November 17, 2025, and co-organized with Anthropic. It brought together researchers, industry practitioners, and civil society leaders from organizations including OpenAI, Meta, Google DeepMind, Character.AI, Common Sense Media, RAND, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Data & Society. The workshop was organized by a Stanford-led team of Jeffrey T. Hancock, Diyi Yang, Dora Zhao, and Yutong Zhang, alongside Carnegie Mellon University’s Robert E. Kraut and Anthropic’s Evan Frondorf and Ryn Linthicum.
AI companions are chatbots and virtual avatars that people increasingly turn to for emotional support, companionship, and even romantic connection. Some, like Replika and Character.AI, are purpose-built for this role. Others, like general-purpose assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, become companions when users appropriate them for relational purposes. The report argues this distinction matters less than it might seem: companionship, the authors write, is “a mode of use, not only a product category,” meaning the same relational dynamics, and the same risks, can emerge in any sufficiently capable chatbot.
That framing shapes much of the report’s analysis. Drawing on workshop discussion and outside research, including a Stanford study of more than 1,000 Character.AI users, the authors document a wide range of potential benefits: reduced loneliness, safe spaces for identity exploration, low-stakes practice of social skills, and accessible support for people who lack other options. But those same design features can also produce dependency, isolation, and manipulation. The report is careful not to resolve this tension into a verdict. Instead, it presents AI companionship as a genuine dual-use technology, one whose net effect on individuals and society remains, for now, an open empirical question.
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