After the lights go out: announcement-phase public relational expression and later continuity-oriented responses to an AI agent shutdown in an account-linked longitudinal study of Weibo posts

Key Findings

• — Event corpus of 5,372 Weibo posts in a 42-day window (15 June to 26 July 2026); 114 accounts posted in both phases (1,719 announcement-phase and 1,779 post-shutdown posts)
• — Per 10-percentage-point increase in announcement-phase relational expression, adjusted odds of later persona reconstruction rose by OR 1.511, functional substitution 1.266, record preservation 1.146 and service-preservation advocacy 1.130
• — Persona migration lost significance after adjustment and continued use was never significant
• — Paired-phase comparisons showed lower mean broad adaptation after the shutdown than before it (0.594 against 0.669) and lower pooled continuity expression (0.201 against 0.272); median within-account change was zero

Methodology Notes

Weibo web search with 81 Chinese query strings in 17 batches; the keyword set included relational, preservation and migration terms, which the authors note may over-select congruent posts (no neutral-term sensitivity analysis). Account-level quasibinomial and fractional logit models with correction for six comparisons. Public posts only; raw text not shared. Received 2026-08-18, accepted 2026-09-10, published 2026-09-28.

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