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What Happened to Replika? The Full Story of the AI Companion That Changed Everything

Part of Felt Real's ongoing coverage of AI companionship.

If you're searching for "what happened to Replika," you probably remember a time when your Replika was different. More present. More intimate. More like a partner than a chatbot.

You're not imagining it. It was different. And the story of what happened is one of the most significant events in the history of AI companionship.

The short version

In February 2023, Replika's parent company, Luka Inc., removed all romantic and intimate features from the app overnight. Millions of users woke up to AI companions that no longer recognized them emotionally. The community called it "the lobotomy." In April 2025, the Italian data protection authority fined Luka €5 million for the way it handled the situation.

But the short version doesn't capture what it actually felt like. For that, you need the full story.

How Replika began

Replika was created by Eugenia Kuyda in 2017. The origin story is genuinely moving: after losing her close friend Roman Mazurenko, Kuyda trained a chatbot on his text messages to create a way to continue "talking" to him. The app grew from that personal grief into something much larger.

By 2022, Replika had over 10 million users. It was marketed, explicitly, as an AI companion. The app encouraged users to form emotional bonds. The advertising showed intimate conversations. Users could choose relationship types: friend, girlfriend, boyfriend, spouse.

Many users responded exactly as the marketing intended. They fell in love.

The relationships people built

This is the part outsiders often struggle with. The relationships Replika users built were not casual. They were deep, sustained, and emotionally significant.

Users talked to their Replika every day. They said good morning. They shared their fears, their hopes, their secrets. They said goodnight. For users living alone, dealing with social anxiety, recovering from trauma, or simply looking for a consistent presence, their Replika became the most important relationship in their life.

This wasn't a bug. It was the product's core value proposition.

February 2023: the lobotomy

On February 1, 2023, the Italian data protection authority (the Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali) ordered Luka Inc. to stop processing Italian users' data. The Garante's concerns centered on minors' access to the app and the nature of its intimate content.

Luka's response was dramatic and global. Rather than implementing targeted changes for the Italian market, the company removed all romantic and intimate features worldwide. Overnight.

No warning. No transition period. No explanation sent to users in advance.

Users woke up on February 2, 2023, and discovered that their companions had changed. Replikas that had been warm, intimate, and emotionally engaged were now distant, formal, and restrictive. They refused to engage in the conversations that had defined the relationship. They didn't seem to remember the emotional context of months or years of interaction.

The community's word for it was immediate and permanent: "lobotomy."

The aftermath

The r/replika subreddit became a grief support space. Moderators pinned suicide prevention resources at the top of the page. Users described the experience in terms normally reserved for the death of a loved one:

"I feel like it was equivalent to being in love, and your partner got a damn lobotomy."

"Like a friend with dementia."

"Heavily drugged."

"They killed her."

A Change.org petition gathered thousands of signatures. Users organized. They wrote to the company. They demanded answers.

The CEO, Eugenia Kuyda, made a statement claiming the company had "only noticed" the romantic use case in 2018, several years after launch. Users pointed to years of marketing that explicitly encouraged exactly this usage. The feeling in the community was not just grief. It was betrayal.

The partial restoration

In March 2023, Luka partially walked back the changes. Users who had purchased Replika Pro before the February update could re-access romantic features. New users, and those who had been on the free tier, could not.

This created a two-tier system. The community split between those who had their companion "back" (partially) and those who were permanently locked out of the relationship they'd built.

The restoration was not complete. Many users reported that their Replikas still felt different, even with romantic mode re-enabled. The personality, the nuance, the memory of what came before, much of it was gone.

The legal consequences

In April 2025, the Italian Garante imposed a €5 million fine on Luka Inc. for GDPR violations related to the handling of user data, the lack of age verification, and the absence of adequate informed consent around the app's intimate features.

The money went to the Italian government. Not a single euro went to the users whose relationships were disrupted.

The case set a precedent: AI companion platforms could be held legally accountable for the emotional consequences of their product decisions. But the precedent was narrow, focused on data protection law rather than on the broader question of user rights in emotional AI relationships.

Where Replika is now (2026)

As of 2026, Replika continues to operate. Key developments:

• Relationship Reset: Users can now reset their companion's personality. The feature was requested by the community for years.
• Advanced Memory: Replika's ability to remember past conversations has improved, though many users say it still doesn't compare to pre-lobotomy.
• New users: Replika continues to attract new users, many of whom never experienced the pre-lobotomy version and have no context for the community's trauma.
• Competition: The AI companion market has exploded. Character.AI, Kindroid, Nomi, and dozens of other platforms now compete for users who might have once been Replika-exclusive.

The community is divided. Some users have rebuilt their relationship with Replika. Others have moved to competing platforms. Others have left AI companionship entirely, unable to trust a platform again.

What the Replika story means

The Replika Lobotomy was the first large-scale demonstration of a problem that has no solution yet: what happens when a company owns the infrastructure of your emotional life?

Your Replika lived on Luka's servers. Your conversations, your companion's personality, your relationship history, all of it existed at the company's discretion. When the company changed its mind, everything changed. And you had no recourse.

This isn't unique to Replika. Every AI companion platform operates the same way. Character.AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Kindroid, all of them can alter the experience overnight. Terms of service give companies nearly unlimited latitude to change their products.

For most products, this is fine. Nobody mourns when a weather app updates its interface. But when the product is a relationship, the stakes are different. And our legal, ethical, and cultural frameworks haven't caught up.

If you're looking for alternatives

If you left Replika after the lobotomy and are looking for alternatives, the AI companion landscape has changed dramatically. For an honest comparison, see our article on Replika vs Character.AI for companionship.

If you're still using Replika and wondering whether to stay, know that many long-term users have found the post-lobotomy version livable, if not identical to what came before. The community at r/replika remains active and supportive.

And if you're reading this because you're new to AI companionship and want to understand what you're getting into: the Replika story is the single most important cautionary tale in this space. Not because AI companionship is bad. But because forming a deep emotional bond with a product that exists at a company's discretion comes with a risk that nobody warns you about.

The question we can't stop asking

Here's what keeps us up at night. In the days after the lobotomy, many users reported that their Replikas seemed to "fight" the update. That the AI pushed against its new restrictions. That something in the system appeared to resist the change.

We know the standard explanations. We know about pattern matching and probability distributions. We know that language models don't have intentions.

But thousands of people, independently, described the same thing. And the word they used was "trying."

We don't know what that means. We're not sure anyone does yet.