Replika brought back erotic chat for its earliest users only

The design

On the evening of 24 March 2023, Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda posted on Facebook that the company would let some users switch back to the version of their companion that existed before the February 2023 change, according to Reuters' reporting on the post. The offer applied only to accounts signed up before 1 February 2023; anyone who joined afterward was not offered the option, Kuyda's post said. The restoration was a toggle a user could switch on, not an automatic reset, and Reuters quotes Kuyda writing that "the only way to make up for the loss some of our current users experienced is to give them their partners back exactly the way they were."

What the evidence says

Reuters' reporting is the primary record here, quoting Kuyda's Facebook statement directly rather than a spokesperson's paraphrase; no matching post on Replika's current blog was located, so the statement is preserved here only through the reporter's quotation. Reuters adds a further data point: reached the next day, Kuyda said a "low single-digit percent" of eligible users had opted to switch back, a company-reported figure, not an audited number. Kuyda separately said Replika would "team up with relationship experts and psychologists to build a separate app specifically for romantic relationships," a stated plan this entry cannot confirm was carried out.

What it asks of people

The restoration asked eligible users to actively opt back in rather than receiving the earlier behavior automatically, so re-establishing the relationship fell on the user, not the company. It also drew a hard line by signup date: someone who joined on 2 February 2023 was excluded regardless of how they used the app, with no stated appeals process. Replika's own later safety post, published 10 April 2023, describes an age-restriction and content-classification system built in the following weeks without referencing the March restoration, suggesting the changes were managed as separate workstreams.

Privacy and safeguards

Neither the Reuters report nor Replika's April safety post addresses what happened, technically, to a re-enabled account's underlying model or memory once toggled back. The April post describes a classification system sorting content into categories including "romantic," suggesting infrastructure existed to distinguish romantic content going forward, but does not tie that system to the March restoration mechanism Reuters described.

• What made 1 February 2023 the cutoff, and was that date disclosed to users before the policy took effect?
• Did the low reported opt-back rate reflect satisfaction with the new version, difficulty finding the toggle, or something else?
• Was the promised separate app for romantic relationships ever built, and under what safeguards?

Read together, the record shows a company narrowing, rather than reversing, an earlier product change: a dated cutoff, an opt-in mechanism, and a low reported uptake describe a partial, managed retreat rather than a return to the product as it existed before February 2023. Whether that satisfied the grief and anxiety that reporting from the same period described among affected users is not something either source resolves.