Abstract
As large-language-model-enhanced chatbots become increasingly expressive and socially responsive, many users begin forming companionship-like bonds with them. This study investigates how using AI companions relates to psychological well-being. We collected self-reported data from 1,131 US adults who use Character.AI, including survey responses and 4,664 chat sessions (464,687 messages) from 237 participants. By triangulating self-reported usage, relationship descriptions and real chat histories, we identify patterns of engagement and associated outcomes. Smaller social networks were associated with reporting companionship as the primary chatbot use (β = −0.03; 95% confidence interval (CI), (−0.05, −0.01)), which in turn was associated with lower well-being (β = −0.48; 95% CI, (−0.70, −0.25)). For self-reported companionship usage, this association was stronger when interactions were intensive (β = −0.31; 95% CI, (−0.56, −0.06)) and highly disclosive (β = −0.38; 95% CI, (−0.63, −0.14)). These results suggest that the association between AI companionship and well-being is not uniform and depends on users’ offline social environments and how chatbots are used.
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Data availability
The de-identified quantitative data are available via GitHub at https://github.com/SALT-NLP/AI-companionship-well-being. For the qualitative data, raw chat history data are not publicly available because they contain potentially sensitive personal information and were collected under consent agreements that do not permit data sharing. Even after de-identification, the conversational nature of the data poses a substantial risk of participant re-identification. To support interpretation and verification of the qualitative findings while preserving participant privacy, we provide de-identified and processed materials as well as the prompts we used in the Supplementary Information, including all the prompts (Supplementary Information sections 1.11–1.15), evaluation procedures for the topic modelling pipeline (Supplementary Information section 1.4.1), chatbot–user conversation topics (Supplementary Information section 1.5) and self-disclosure topics (Supplementary Information section 1.6), as well as positive and negative influence topics derived from topic modelling (Supplementary Information section 1.7), illustrated with paraphrased excerpts from participant self-report survey responses. We also include the topic model figure (Fig. 4) to show the categories derived from the data and their relative volumes.
Code availability
The code that supports the findings of this study is availablebeing
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Acknowledgements
We thank O. Shaikh, Y. Zhang, C. Si, L. Popowski, T. Piccardi, H. Zhu, R. Louie, C. Ziems, J. Huang and W. Liang for their helpful feedback on this work. We also thank members of the Stanford SALT lab and the Stanford CS 224C course for their suggestions at different stages of this project. This work is supported in part by grants from the NSF CAREER IIS-2247357 (D.Y.), ONR N00014-24-1-2532 (D.Y.), Sloan Foundation (D.Y.) and NIMH R01MH139114-01 (D.Y.). D.Z. is supported in part by the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. R.K. is supported by NIMH 60663.1.1090827.
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Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Yutong Zhang, Dora Zhao & Diyi Yang
Department of Communication, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Jeffrey T. Hancock
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Robert Kraut
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Y.Z. and D.Z. designed the study, collected the data and conducted the data analysis with guidance from D.Y. R.K. and J.T.H. provided guidance on the interpretation of results. Y.Z. wrote the manuscript, and all authors contributed to manuscript revisions
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Cite this article
Zhang, Y., Zhao, D., Hancock, J.T. et al. Interaction with AI companions and psychological well-being.
Nat Hum Behav (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02516-2
Received:27 June 2025
Accepted:03 June 2026
Published:04 August 2026
Version of record:04 August 2026
DOI
:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02516-2
