Ending an AI Companionship: Consumer Exit, Relational Vulnerability and Duties of Transition

Key Findings

• — Existing EU rights support parts of a post-ending protection (retrieval of user-provided content, cancellation, data portability) but establish no right to preservation or continuity of the companion
• — The proposed framework separates the interactive (generation), records, transactional and recourse functions of a companion service so that an urgent suspension of generation need not remove billing, export or complaint channels
• — It prioritises effective departure, usable retrieval and organisational accountability, and rejects compulsory farewells, diagnostic proof of attachment and indefinite model preservation as conditions of protection
• — A four-step legal test is proposed: classify the ending event, identify the function affected, identify the governing legal source and condition, and ask whether the opportunity offered was practically usable (evidence such as notices, timestamps, export logs and billing records)
• — The paper lists testable questions for future empirical work, including whether a non-conversational exit route improves users' understanding of cancellation, export and deletion compared with a dialogue-only route
• — It argues that duties should attach to services that acquire relational significance through sustained interaction, persistent personalisation, stored history and provider continuity claims, not only to services marketed as companions

Methodology Notes

Doctrinal legal analysis with a proposed framework; no empirical data. Single author, no institutional affiliation stated on the preprint (the author is a Brussels-based privacy lawyer per public profiles). Research Square preprint, posted 2026-09-23, status In Review, CC BY 4.0, 23 pages, DOI 10.21203/rs.3.rs-10986918/v1. The Research Square page and the PDF (v1.pdf route; the assets-eu direct link returned 403) were fetched and read; the Crossref record matched.

Sources