Chinese Labs' Latest Product? Roleplay
ChinaTalk Irene Zhang
China became the first country to regulate anthropomorphic AI services on July 15, with rules banning emotional manipulation and limiting minors' access, prompting ByteDance and Alibaba to remove some companion offerings. According to OpenRouter and Andreessen Horowitz's 2025 State of Open Models study, roleplay was the most token-intensive use case for open-source AI models last year, consuming hundreds of thousands of hours. Chinese AI labs like MiniMax and DeepSeek are now building roleplay-specific products and evaluation benchmarks, while Western companies treat the category as a small niche despite its actual scale.
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