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The Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University and the Institute for Family Studies published this finding in May 2026 in a report called "Secret Soulmates." They surveyed 2,431 US adults aged 18 to 30 who described themselves as currently dating, engaged, or married, and asked specifically about AI chatbots built to simulate a romantic partner.

Appfigures, the app-intelligence firm, gave TechCrunch a first look at the numbers in August, and they tell a clearer growth story than most of the market-research reports floating around this space. There are 337 active, revenue-generating AI companion apps worldwide, and 128 of them launched in 2025 alone. That subsection of the mobile market pulled in $82 million in the first half of the year and was on pace to clear $120 million by December, up 64 percent from the same period in 2024.

Common Sense Media released this finding in July 2025, based on a nationally representative survey of 1,060 teens aged 13 to 17, conducted by researchers at NORC at the University of Chicago.

Published in March 2025, this was two studies run in parallel rather than one. MIT Media Lab researcher Cathy Fang and colleagues ran a four week randomized controlled trial with close to 1,000 participants using ChatGPT daily. Separately, OpenAI analyzed roughly 40 million real ChatGPT conversations for patterns, without any human reviewer reading the content, to see how often people engaged emotionally with the chatbot in normal use.

This one is older than the others on this list but keeps resurfacing because it's the clearest cautionary data point the AI companion industry has produced so far. Independent security researcher Troy Hunt added the incident, confirming roughly 1.9 million exposed email addresses tied to user accounts and private chat prompts.