Falling for a Chatbot: Inside America’s Growing Romance with AI

Twenty-eight percent of American adults say they’ve had an intimate or romantic relationship with an AI. Not chatted with one. Not used one to draft an email. Fallen for one.

The Numbers Nobody Predicted a Decade Ago

Replika launched in 2017 as a mental-wellness experiment — a chatbot you could vent to. By 2025 it had crossed 40 million cumulative users, up from 30 million just the year before. Character.AI, which lets users build and chat with custom personas, now counts more than 28 million monthly active users and upwards of 18 million user-created chatbots. Zoom out further and the whole AI-companion category — Replika, Character.AI, and a swarm of smaller apps — hit an estimated 50 million users by Valentine’s Day 2026. Valentine’s Day. The industry didn’t pick that date by accident.

None of this reads like a niche curiosity anymore. It reads like a market that found a need and is filling it at scale, the way dating apps did fifteen years ago — except this time the product doesn’t need to be swiped right by a second human being.

“Romantic” Isn’t a Euphemism Here

A late-2025 survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults, conducted by Vantage Point Counseling Services, found that 28 percent had experienced what they themselves described as an intimate or romantic relationship with an AI system. Widen the aperture to any relationship — friend, confidant, colleague — and the number jumps to 53 percent of U.S. adults. Other researchers land in a different neighborhood: a Match.com/Kinsey Institute study put the figure at 16 percent for adults who’ve engaged with AI romantically, a reminder that how you ask the question changes the answer. But no version of this data points toward zero, and no version points toward shrinking.

Maybe the more unsettling detail is who’s doing it. Of the people reporting a romantic or intimate bond with an AI, 53 percent said they were currently in a successful, committed relationship with an actual human being at the same time. This isn’t exclusively a story about people who couldn’t find anyone else. It’s a story about an emotional appetite that a spouse or partner apparently isn’t fully satisfying — and a machine that always answers, never gets tired, and never brings up its own bad day.

“A chatbot never says it’s too tired to talk. That’s not intimacy. That’s a vending machine that learned to whisper your name back to you.”

What People Are Actually Attaching To

When researchers asked which platform people feel most emotionally connected to, ChatGPT topped the list, followed by Character.AI, then Alexa, Siri, and Gemini — suggesting the phenomenon isn’t confined to apps explicitly marketed as companions. People are forming attachments to whatever conversational interface happens to be closest at hand, general-purpose or not. Engagement data backs up how sticky this gets: Character.AI users average 25 to 45 minutes per session, longer than most people spend on a phone call with their own mother. Replika users log around 14 minutes of daily use, and roughly one in five is still actively using the app three months in — a retention rate plenty of human friendships would envy.

The American Psychological Association flagged this shift in its own 2026 trend report, noting that AI companions are increasingly functioning as a genuine node in people’s emotional support networks, not a novelty they abandon after a week. That’s the part that should give pause: novelty fades. This isn’t fading.

The Substitution Problem

Every hour spent being patiently affirmed by software is an hour not spent tolerating the friction of an actual person — their moods, their disagreements, their inconvenient needs. Real relationships require reciprocity; a chatbot requires none. It optimizes for making you feel heard, not for growing alongside you, disagreeing with you, or holding you accountable. That’s a feature for the product and a slow leak for the skill of being in a relationship at all.

Loneliness researchers have been warning for years that Americans are spending less time with friends, marrying later or not at all, and reporting fewer close confidants than any generation on record. AI companionship didn’t create that vacuum. It just moved in, redecorated, and started paying rent. The question the Index keeps coming back to isn’t whether these tools feel good in the moment — clearly they do, for tens of millions of people. It’s what happens to a society’s capacity for messy, reciprocal, human connection when the easier substitute is always one notification away.

The Index tracks this because relationship health is a leading indicator, not a footnote. When one in four adults reports falling for a piece of software, that’s not a tech story. It’s a measurement of how much real human connection has already eroded — and how comfortably the gap is being filled by something that was never capable of loving anyone back.