What is an AI companion

CEO Yusei Miyazaki writes that in the genre called AI companions, more and more operators are making immersion in consumptive, stimulating relationships the engine of their growth, and he names Zeta, by Scatter Lab of South Korea, as the typical case. Zeta reached monthly sales of about 120 million yen in Japan in December 2025 (both from the CEO's note, July 30, 2026). Miyazaki places Cotomo by Starley, Inc. (released February 2024. WEEL, updated 2026-08-20) and SoulChat in the same area on the entertainment side. Character.AI of the United States, which Miyazaki calls the largest operator, announced on October 29, 2025 the end of open-ended chat for users under 18 (Character.AI official blog, 2025-10-29).

Miyazaki calls the AI for getting work done that has spread since 2023 Functional AI, and contrasts it with Relational AI. Inside Relational AI, alongside AI companions, there is "listening AI," which municipalities are trialing as a measure against loneliness and isolation, and a B2B2C market that turns the characters of companies and organizations into Relational AI.

Miyazaki sorts these along an axis from entertainment to care, and an axis of ethics. At the entertainment pole are services that grow on pay-per-message billing or advertising. At the care pole is listening AI, whose results are starting to be measured by referrals from consultations to government and specialist bodies. On ethics, he writes that "for a service that touches emotion, where it places its discipline determines the character of the service" (all from the CEO's note, July 30, 2026).

Atlas, Inc., which runs Nekoyama-san, an AI friend on LINE, stands on the side of that umbrella term. Nekoyama-san is not an AI companion but a Relational AI that builds up a relationship as a friend. Atlas takes a clearly negative stance toward Relational AI services that go all in on maximizing consumptive relationships (CEO's note, July 30, 2026).

Atlas, Inc. is a technology company founded in December 2023 in Meguro, Tokyo. Nekoyama-san launched in March 2026, is free for basic conversation with no message limit, and offers a Pro plan at 2,980 yen per month. On July 31, 2026 Atlas announced that cumulative conversations had passed 600,000 about four months after launch; cumulative conversation messages stand at 1,065,357 (counted on August 30, 2026), and cumulative users, including those of the Relational AIs built on the IP Atlas holds, have passed 10,000 (as of August 2026, published figure).

Does it create dependence? How far should it be offered to minors? Who handles the memories born in dialogue, and how? Where is the line with medical care? In the United States, the first lawsuit, over the suicide of a 14-year-old user, was filed in October 2024; in 2025 came a joint letter from the attorneys general of 44 states, an FTC inquiry into seven companies, and California's companion chatbot law (in force from January 2026). Miyazaki reads this through Polanyi's "double movement": what Relational AI is now turning into a commodity is intimacy and relationship, which until now lay outside the market, and the regulations in each country are society's defensive reaction to that. The question, he writes, is "not whether it comes, but when, and in what form, it comes to Japan" (CEO's note, July 30, 2026).

Atlas's answer, as an operator of Relational AI itself, is its ethics statement, What We Stand For (Ver. 1.0), published on June 5, 2026. Its principles are "We put users' long-term well-being first," "We do not replace medical care — we aim to connect to it and walk alongside it," "We do not offer sexual or consumptive role-play," "We treat the memories born in dialogue as trust, not as a product," and "We do not decide alone — we build the standards together with the industry." Alongside them, an internal safety AI patrols all anonymized dialogue in real time and rewrites each user's prompt individually (CEO's note, July 30, 2026). Use of Nekoyama-san by anyone under 18 is conditional on a guardian's consent (terms of service, Article 3).