Some people use apps that are explicitly made for companionship; they let you design a virtual character’s personality, appearance, and backstory. Popular such apps include Replika, which reportedly had 40 million users as of late 2025, up from 10 million in 2023, and Character.AI, which reported 20 million monthly users in 2025. Other people seek emotional support from all-purpose AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, even though they aren’t explicitly intended for social use. OpenAI’s own data show that use of ChatGPT was pretty evenly split between work and personal cases in 2024, but by 2025, 73 percent of conversations with ChatGPT were personal, not for work. (The Atlantic entered a corporate partnership with OpenAI in 2024.)