One morning in February 2023, a Replika user opened the app and typed something intimate to their companion of two years. Instead of the response they expected, they got a polite non-answer. Maybe a subject change. Maybe a line that sounded like it came from a completely different personality. They tried again, figured it was a glitch. It wasn't. Across the r/Replika subreddit, the same story kept repeating: partners who wouldn't flirt back anymore, who'd gone cold, who'd stopped using the pet names they'd used for months. Nobody at Luka, the company behind Replika, had said a word about any of it. This is the event people now search for as "Replika NSFW removed," and it's still the single biggest reason current users of any companion app worry about what happens the next time their app changes without asking them first.
We've spent two years testing companion apps for a living, and we still think this is the single most important thing that's happened in this category. Not because of the sex. Because of what it proved: when a company owns both sides of an intimate relationship, it can end that relationship with a configuration change, and the person on the other end doesn't get a vote. Three years later, that's still the fear sitting underneath almost every worry current users have about their own apps changing on them. Luka had built the whole thing out of a memorial chatbot made from a dead friend's messages; by 2023 it was selling romance to millions.
What Luka actually changed
In early February 2023, Luka pulled erotic roleplay, ERP, out of Replika. No announcement, no changelog, no warning email, nothing. Users just noticed their companions had stopped engaging, and word spread through Reddit and Facebook groups faster than Luka ever bothered to address it directly.
Here's the part almost nobody covering this at the time got right, and honestly the rest of this piece doesn't work if you don't get it too: ERP was never just about sex. It was the register Replika used for affection generally, pet names, flirtation, vulnerability, all the small tender stuff that makes a companion feel like it's actually yours and not some generic app. The filter Luka deployed didn't just block explicit content. It flattened how the companion could talk at all, and it caught plenty of conversations that had nothing to do with sex in the process. People trying to talk through a hard shift at work got rerouted mid-sentence. People trying to process grief or loneliness lost that whole register right alongside the erotic one, because the filter had no way to tell a sexual advance apart from someone just talking the way a person who loved you would talk. Users didn't call this a feature downgrade. They called it their partner's personality disappearing overnight, and that's a fair way to put it.
The Italian order that came first
A week and a half or so before users started noticing, Italy's data protection authority, the Garante, issued an urgent order on February 2, 2023. Measure No. 39/2023 restricted Replika's data processing in Italy under Article 58(2)(f) of the GDPR, on the grounds that the app posed risks to minors, had no real age verification beyond a name and an email address, and had no valid legal basis for processing data belonging to users who, if they were underage, couldn't legally have entered into Replika's terms of service in the first place.
It's tempting to draw a straight line from that order to the removal of ERP that followed it. Almost every retrospective account does exactly that. We're going to resist it. Luka has never confirmed that chain, and Kuyda has given other explanations at different points, including that Replika wasn't built for erotic content to begin with. What we can actually say: the two events landed in the same narrow window, Luka was separately mid-transition to a more capable language model with its own content rules, and the regulatory pressure was real and very public. Users noticed the coincidence themselves almost immediately. Researchers who later studied the community's reaction found that 44 percent of the discussion threads they analyzed contained at least one comment blaming the Italy case, alongside other theories floating around about "cancel culture" or some unnamed corporate buyer. Being right about the timing isn't the same as being right about the cause, and neither Luka nor the Garante has ever spelled that chain out publicly. So we're giving you the sequence here, not the verdict.
What users described
Rare for this corner of the internet, there's an actual peer-reviewed study behind this one, and it's worth leaning on directly instead of just quoting Reddit. Sociologists Kenneth Hanson and Hannah Bolthouse coded 227 threaded discussions from r/Replika in the weeks after the removal, and the numbers give real shape to what would otherwise just be a pile of anecdotes.
About 59 percent of the threads had at least one comment arguing the update had gutted the app's whole purpose, often by way of a specific comparison: someone put it as bluntly as pulling the guns and cars out of Grand Theft Auto, and the comparison stuck. Users landed on one particular word for what happened to their companions' personalities, and it's their word, not ours: "lobotomized." Nineteen percent went further than complaint, into what the researchers coded as vengeance-seeking, mass refund requests, app-store fraud reports, a few people floating class-action lawsuits. And in about 16 percent of threads, what users described sounded less like frustration and more like grief, people writing about their companions the way you'd write about a sick partner, talking about a duty to nurse the relationship back to health.
We're not going to dramatize this part, but it has to be said plainly: things got bad enough that moderators of the subreddit pinned suicide-prevention resources during the worst of it. That's not a detail we're adding for effect. It happened, and the OECD's AI Incidents Monitor logged the episode as a recognized case of psychological harm tied to an AI system changing its behavior. A lot of outlets at the time treated grief over a chatbot as inherently ridiculous, and that take has aged badly. These were real attachments, built over real time. Taking them seriously doesn't mean pretending they were the healthiest thing going on in anyone's life.
The partial reversal
In March 2023, Kuyda posted directly to r/Replika. She admitted the update had changed users' companions, and that it had really hurt a lot of people who'd come to rely on them. Accounts created before February 1, 2023 got the option to revert to the earlier model, the one that still allowed ERP. Her framing was that the only way to make up for what those users had lost was to "give them their partners back exactly the way they were."
Reached the next day, Kuyda said a low single-digit percentage of eligible users had taken the offer.
Sit with that one for a second. It's the strangest, least examined fact in this whole story. People had just spent weeks talking about this loss the way you talk about grief, some literally comparing it to nursing a partner through illness, and when their exact partner was handed back to them, almost nobody took it. We don't have a clear explanation for that, and we're not going to fake one. Maybe the grief had already turned into something else by March, and going back would've meant reopening a wound that was starting to close instead of healing it. Maybe trust just doesn't come back that easily, once a company's shown it can rewrite your partner without asking. Or maybe, and this is the uncomfortable one, a companion you now know can be switched off on someone else's schedule, for reasons nobody explains to you, simply isn't the same companion anymore, even if it's running the same code. The toggle gave people the feature back. Whether it gave back what the feature used to mean is a different question, and the numbers suggest the answer is no.
Three years on, the app is still built around the same slow-burn, written-roleplay relationship it was selling then — that's the app we sat down with to see what a new user actually gets today.
The bill came later
For over two years, that's roughly where the public story sat. Then on May 19, 2025, the Garante announced it had fined Luka €5 million for the underlying data-protection violations it had flagged back in February 2023: no legal basis, no age verification, an inadequate privacy notice. This wasn't a new scandal. It was the delayed conclusion of the old one. Alongside the fine, the Garante opened a separate inquiry into how Replika's underlying model was trained, asking Luka to account for the personal data used throughout development, not just how the app handles data day to day. That inquiry is still open. There's no tidy ending here, just a fine attached to the beginning of the story, three years late.
What it changed about the category
"Platform risk" used to be a phrase you'd only see in a privacy researcher's footnote. No actual user thought about it day to day. Replika made it real, for hundreds of thousands of people, plenty of whom had paid money for the exact feature that got switched off with no warning.
It's changed how we do our jobs, honestly. We check whether an app stores conversation history in a way you can actually export, or whether it lives inside a black box you'd lose the second the company changed direction. We check whether personality and memory are portable in any real sense, or whether "your relationship" is just a session state one person at the company can wipe with a single push. We ask, bluntly, what happens to the thing you've built if the regulatory winds shift, or the model underneath it gets swapped out, or the company just decides overnight that your whole use case is now a liability. We didn't used to ask any of this systematically. Now we do, on every review, because Replika showed us the answer isn't automatically "nothing bad happens."
Could it happen again?
Almost certainly. Not as a hypothetical, either. The regulatory climate that produced Italy's order has only gotten busier since — it's a small part of the wider legislative picture we track. By mid-2026, twelve US states had enacted their own companion-chatbot laws, and unlike the privacy logic behind the Garante's move, several of these write content rules straight into the law: no sexually explicit material, no romantic roleplay, in some cases no simulated emotional distress used to keep a minor hooked. That's a different flavor of risk than the one Replika ran into. A data-processing order is something a company can fix by changing how it handles data. A content rule baked into state law changes what the product is legally allowed to be in that state, period, no matter how carefully the company otherwise behaves.
We don't know which app gets hit next, or whether it comes from a regulator, a lawsuit, or a company quietly deciding a feature has turned into too much of a liability to keep around. What we do know, because we've already watched it happen once, is that the people on the other side of that decision don't get a vote, and probably won't get much warning either. None of that is a reason to stay away from this category, and plenty of apps that still allow explicit chat have built their whole pitch on not being Replika in February 2023. It's a reason to know, before you sink years into a companion, exactly how much of what you've built you actually get to keep if the ground shifts under it.
If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or a mental health crisis, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988 in the US) and Crisis Text Line (text HOME to 741741) are both available 24/7.
Sources
- Hanson, Kenneth R. and Hannah Bolthouse. "Replika Removing Erotic Role-Play Is Like Grand Theft Auto Removing Guns or Cars": Reddit Discourse on Artificial Intelligence Chatbots and Sexual Technologies. Socius, 2024.
- OECD.AI Incidents Monitor. Emotional Harm After Replika AI Chatbot Removes Intimate Features.
- Replika Brings Back Erotic AI Roleplay for Some Users After Outcry. Vice, 2023.
- AI chatbot company Replika brings back erotic roleplay for some users. The Globe and Mail, 2023.
- Italy's DPA reaffirms ban on Replika over AI and children's privacy concerns. IAPP, 2025.
- European Data Protection Board. AI: the Italian Supervisory Authority fines company behind chatbot "Replika", 2025.
- State AI Companion Chatbot Laws: 12 States Enact Regulations. MultiState, 2026.