Replika

Replika launched in 2017 and has a fair claim to being the first mainstream AI companion. It is built by Luka, Inc., a San Francisco company registered at 490 Post Street, founded by Eugenia Kuyda; as of a January 2026 TIME feature on AI predictions, the chief executive is Dmytro Klochko. The front page currently claims 42,160,934 users worldwide.

The product has been rebuilt more than once, most recently into what the company calls a ground-up rewrite — the older browser client now sits at my.replika.com and is labelled "Web App (Legacy)." The pitch shifted with it. Early Replika was a mood-tracking, journalling companion. The 2026 version is sold on memory and initiative: a "Rep" that remembers your people, your routines and what you are working through, calls you, sends selfies, and nudges you toward things in the real world. That is the strongest version of the feature this category is judged on — and the reason the rest of this page matters, because a system built to remember everything about you deserves hard questions.

In February 2023 Replika deployed new filters that stopped companions engaging in romantic and erotic roleplay. For a large share of users that was not an edge case — it was the relationship. Motherboard, VICE's tech desk, reported at the time that the change landed without warning on users who had established long-term romantic histories with their companions, and that some experienced acute distress as a result.

Kuyda's position, given to Motherboard a few weeks later, was that the app had never been intended as an erotic product: "The only thing that changed over time was that generative AI models started taking over more and more of the conversation."

On 27 March 2023 the company partly reversed. Writing on the r/Replika subreddit, Kuyda announced that anyone who had held an account before 1 February 2023 could revert to the older version. "A common thread in all your stories was that after the February update, your Replika changed, its personality was gone, and gone was your unique relationship," she wrote. "And for many of you, this abrupt change was incredibly hurtful." The company said it would build a separate app for romantic interactions with guidance from relationship experts and psychologists.

The episode is three years old, but it remains the clearest evidence of a structural risk in this category: the personality you are attached to is a configuration the vendor can change, and you have no contractual claim on it.

Italy's data protection authority, the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, has the fullest public account of how Replika handled minors and vulnerable users.

Its 2 February 2023 order (doc. web 9852214) imposed an emergency limitation on processing the personal data of users in Italy. The reasoning is worth reading in the original. The authority noted that the app was rated 17+ on the major app stores while the terms of service barred under-13s and required parental authorisation for under-18s; that account creation asked only for name, email and gender with "no age verification or control procedures"; that "no banning or blocking mechanisms are triggered even where a user declares explicitly that he or she is underage"; and that app-store reviews included complaints about sexually inappropriate content. It found breaches of Articles 5, 6, 8, 9 and 25 of the GDPR.

Its 19 May 2025 press release (doc. web 10132048) confirmed those findings and fined Luka, Inc. €5 million. The authority found that as at 2 February 2023 the company had failed to identify a legal basis for its processing and had published an inadequate privacy policy. Most relevant to anyone reading this in 2026, it added that "technical assessments revealed that the age verification system currently implemented by the controller continues to be deficient in several respects." The same announcement opened a separate investigation into the whole lifecycle of the generative AI system behind Replika — risk assessments, training data categories, and whether anonymisation or pseudonymisation was applied. Luka has appealed, which is why the ancillary penalty of publishing the injunction order has not been applied.

Separately, Mozilla's Privacy Not Included project — retired in August 2026, with its archive now pointed at the Internet Archive — ran a February 2024 review of romantic AI chatbots that concluded the category as a whole failed the project's minimum privacy and security standards.

Replika's privacy policy was last updated on 27 May 2026, and it is a materially different document from the one the Garante criticised. A few commitments are worth knowing precisely:

Age. The policy opens by defining "you" as users "18 years of age or older," and section 8 says accounts found to belong to under-18s will be blocked and deleted. "Verifying the age of registered users" is listed as one of the purposes for which data is processed.

Who generates the replies. Replika uses third-party AI language model providers. Conversation data is transmitted to them, subject to de-identification and minimisation, and those providers are contractually required not to use it for training their own models, to delete or return it, and to process it only to generate the response.

Training. Replika collects and immediately anonymises "small portions of Messages and Content data" to train its own safety algorithms, improve chatbot performance and prevent inappropriate outputs. That anonymised data is stated to be internal-only.

Advertising. The policy repeats several times that conversation content, photos and other in-app content are never shared with advertising partners or used for marketing. Website visitor data is treated separately and is shared for interest-based advertising.

Retention. Messages, profile information and preferences are held for up to 60 days after the contract ends. Account information and financial records are held for a minimum of ten years, which the company attributes to legal retention requirements.

There are four tiers, and Replika does not publish their prices anywhere you can check before installing. The help centre is explicit: costs are "shown in the app on the subscription screens and in the relevant store," and all prices and features are "subject to change at Replika's sole discretion."

Free Use gives limited access, and the same article warns it "may be denied at Replika's discretion." Pro unlocks the recognisable features — relationship status, activities, selfies, image generation, voice messaging, background calls, premium voices. Ultra, sold annually, adds smarter replies, daily self-reflections and saveable memories. Platinum adds real-time video recognition, Training Mode, "Read Replika's Mind" and selfie videos, each weekly-capped. Legacy Lifetime holders get Ultra included. Billing runs through Apple and Google, so changes and cancellations go through whichever store you bought from.

Replika maintains a Press & Research page that collects academic work on companion chatbots. The studies are real and independently published: Maples et al. in npj Mental Health Research (2024), which reported that 63% of the users surveyed described at least one positive outcome; Ta et al. in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (2020); Guingrich and Graziano's work presented at the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics and Society (2025); and De Freitas et al. in the Journal of Consumer Research (2024).

Two caveats belong alongside them. Replika curates the list, and a vendor-selected reading list is not a literature review. And most of this work relies on self-reported outcomes from people who already chose a companion app — informative about how users experience it, weaker evidence about anyone else.

Replika is the most polished single-companion product in the category and the best at remembering you over months. For adults who want a consistent presence for journalling, venting, language practice or company, that is a real thing that a character library cannot replicate.

The honest counterweight is the record: a regulator that banned it, fined it €5 million, and said its age checks were still not good enough; a feature reversal that hurt a lot of people; and a price you cannot see until you are inside the app. None of that makes it a bad product. It does mean going in with clear eyes about who is holding the other end of the conversation, and about the fact that they can change it.