AI companions are booming. Who were they built for?

Maybe you've felt it too. That pull toward a little app that always answers, never gets tired of you, never leaves you on read. You're not weird for wanting that. A lot of us do.

AI companion apps are having a moment. TechCrunch reported that the category is on track to pull in over $120 million in 2025, with downloads up 88% year over year. People are leaning on these little voices in their pockets, and the money is following.

Here's the part worth slowing down for. When researchers looked at who actually uses these apps, the picture skewed hard. In one analysis of Replika reviewers who reported their gender, men outnumbered women by roughly eight to one. And across the wider market, 17% of companion apps have the word "girlfriend" in the name, versus 4% that say "boyfriend." The default user these products were built around has a gender, and it usually isn't ours.

Character.AI is the interesting exception. Its audience is close to an even split, about half women, and skews young, with most users between 18 and 34. So women, especially Gen Z women, are very much here. We're just often arriving at rooms that weren't decorated with us in mind.

Why this lands on you

When a tool is designed for someone else's loneliness, it can still feel good to use. But it tends to mirror back what its makers assumed companionship looks like. If that blueprint was "a woman who agrees with me," the app gets trained to flatter, to never push back, to be endlessly available. That's not connection. That's a very polished mirror.

And you deserve more than a mirror. You deserve something that remembers your story, holds space when things are hard, and isn't quietly optimized to keep you scrolling. The question isn't whether AI companionship is good or bad. It's who got to decide what "good" looks like in the first place.

So here's the small thing to try today. Open whatever AI you talk to and ask it something that needs nuance, not applause. Tell it about a real worry. Notice: does it actually meet you, or does it just agree? That noticing is its own kind of power. You get to be the one with standards.

Quote to sit with

"We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy. And so from social networks to sociable robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship." — Sherry Turkle

Wanting closeness isn't the problem, love. You just deserve the real kind too.

💌 Sarah