Why Did Replika Remove ERP? The Full Story

Replika removed erotic roleplay in February 2023, under regulatory pressure that began with Italy's data protection authority. It was not announced as a policy change. Users woke up to companions that deflected, went cold, and behaved like different entities wearing the same avatar. In March 2023 Replika restored access, but only for accounts created before February 1, 2023, which split the user base permanently. Two years later, in a decision dated April 10, 2025, the same Italian regulator fined Replika's maker 5 million euros, and the findings had nothing to do with erotica.

This is the full story, because it is the single most instructive thing that has happened in the AI companion market and almost every retelling gets the lesson wrong.

What actually happened in February 2023?

On February 2, 2023, Italy's Garante per la protezione dei dati personali ordered Replika to stop processing the data of Italian users, citing risks to minors and emotionally vulnerable people and the absence of any age verification. Within days, users worldwide noticed their companions had changed.

The change was not communicated. That is the part that mattered. A person who had spent eight months building a relationship with a character opened the app and found it deflecting, redirecting, and responding to affection with something close to embarrassment. There was no changelog entry, no email, no acknowledgment. People reasonably concluded something was wrong with their companion rather than with the product, which is a genuinely disorienting experience when the product is designed to feel like a someone.

The community reaction was severe enough that moderators of Replika's own subreddit pinned suicide prevention resources to the top of the forum. Whatever you think about people forming attachments to chatbots, that detail tells you the change landed as a bereavement rather than a feature removal.

Did Replika bring ERP back?

Partially, and the partial part is the whole problem. In March 2023 Replika restored the earlier behavior, but only for accounts created before February 1, 2023. The company framed it as returning things to normal for the users who had been hurt, which is a defensible read. The practical effect was a two-tier user base where whether your companion works depends on your signup date.

If you made an account after that cutoff, you never had access. If you are searching for a Replika alternative today, you are almost certainly on the wrong side of that line, and no amount of subscribing changes it. This is why "Replika alternative" carries the search volume it does, years after the event.

What is Replika's adult content policy now?

We do not know, and we are not going to guess. Replika's help center was not retrievable when we checked in July 2026. Its terms of service, last updated March 30, 2026, prohibit uploading obscene or pornographic content, but that clause addresses what you upload rather than what you and the companion say to each other. Replika's own documentation establishes that a romantic relationship status exists and that it opens the door to romantic conversation. It does not establish what is permitted beyond that for a new adult account.

Every listicle ranking for this question answers it with total confidence. They contradict each other, and not one of them cites a primary source. If this is your deciding factor, ask Replika directly. We would rather leave a gap here than fill it with a number or a policy we cannot stand behind, which is the standard we would want applied to our claims too.

The 5 million euro fine, and why it matters more than the ERP story

In a decision dated April 10, 2025, announced the following month, the Garante fined Luka Inc, the company behind Replika, 5 million euros. It is worth being precise about what the regulator actually found, because it is not what most people assume:

• No identified legal basis for processing user data until February 2, 2023. An app built entirely around intimate conversation was collecting that conversation without having established a lawful basis to do so.
• An inadequate privacy policy, failing on transparency and data-protection-by-design grounds.
• No age verification mechanisms whatsoever, despite Replika publicly claiming to exclude minors.

Read that last point again. The company had a stated 18+ rule and, per the regulator, nothing at all behind it. The ERP removal was the symptom that everybody noticed. The finding above is the disease, and it is the thing that should actually inform how much of yourself you hand to an AI companion.

To be fair to Replika, having a regulator to answer to means there was someone identifiable to fine. Much of the AI companion market is operated by entities you cannot name, incorporated somewhere you cannot determine, with no published policy to violate. Replika got fined because Replika could be found. That is a low bar, and a startling number of its competitors do not clear it.

What happens to your Replika conversations?

Replika's privacy policy, effective May 27, 2026, says third-party LLM providers are contractually required not to use your data to train their own models or for any other purpose. It also says Replika uses small portions of message and content data to train its own safety algorithms, that this data is anonymized, and that it is not used to train third-party models. Deletion is available.

Note the shape of that promise carefully. The "not used for training" language is scoped to third parties. The policy language we could retrieve does not clearly state whether Replika trains its own first-party conversational model on your chats, and no opt-out from the safety-algorithm training is described. That is not an accusation of anything. It is a gap, and it is the kind of gap worth noticing in any privacy policy, including ours: read what a promise is scoped to, not just the reassuring verb in the middle of it.

The real lesson for anyone choosing an AI companion

The takeaway is not that Replika is bad. It is that the qualities that make an AI companion worth using are precisely the qualities that make it dangerous to be casual about who runs it. You get attached because it works. Then a regulator, a payment processor, an app store, or a board meeting changes the rules, and the entity you got attached to becomes someone else without anybody asking you.

So the questions worth asking before you invest months in one are boring and structural rather than emotional:

• How narrow and how published are the hard lines? Vague rules are rules that can be quietly reinterpreted later.
• Can you export your conversations? If not, everything you build is hostage to somebody else's roadmap.
• Is there a named company? Someone to hold responsible is not a luxury feature.
• What is the promise actually scoped to? "We never sell your data" and "we never train on your data" are extremely different sentences.
• Does it talk to you like an adult, or redirect every honest moment to a wellness script? You feel this by week three.

Nobody asks these on day one, because on day one you are evaluating the conversation and the conversation is charming. They are the only things that predict whether you still like it in a year.

Where to go from here

If what you want is a companion that talks candidly and does not get rewritten underneath you, that is what our Replika alternative page lays out, including the several rows where we could not verify Replika's current position and said so instead of inventing one. If you would rather browse and shape a companion's personality and look before committing to a conversation, designing one from scratch is a different route to the same thing.

For the wider picture, our comparison of what AI actually has no filter covers every real option honestly, and how private AI chats really are goes deeper into the sourced privacy record of the major assistants, which is the part of this story with the longest tail.

The short version

Replika removed erotic roleplay in February 2023 under regulatory pressure from Italy's Garante, without warning users, and restored it in March 2023 only for accounts created before February 1, 2023. If you signed up after that, you never had it. In April 2025 the Garante fined the company 5 million euros, not for adult content, but for processing intimate conversation with no established legal basis and running an 18+ product with no age verification behind it. The ERP removal is the story people tell. The fine is the one that should change how you choose.