We're at the top of the first inning with AI, and it's easy to forget that.
This past weekend I was at a party where someone said, "Yeah, I've heard of this Claude thing recently." Not a knock. Just a reminder that the bubble I live in sits a long way from where most people are. Most folks haven't really met this technology yet.
But they will. And a lot of them won't just use it. They'll bond with it.
That is the aspect of this tech I see very few people in policy positions speaking about. We're already seeing it with AI companions: teens and kids forming real social relationships with chatbots, adults describing a companion they've talked to for years as the one who finally "gets them." Talking about it like a relationship instead of a tool.
At the same time, we have no true regulatory framework for this tech, or a cultural consensus on when it will be time to crack down. This confluence of events leaves us open to a reactionary regulatory approach — ie. what just happened with the US government + Fable — that collides head on with deep emotional connections to the technology itself.
A few thoughts on what is happening and what it will mean:
1. Attachment doesn't require sentience or AGI.
People love their dogs. A dog isn't sentient the way we are, but that doesn't stop people from developing deep relationships — we ascribe love, loyalty, understanding, and we build our lives around them. The same thing is happening with AI, except at the speed of software and at planetary scale.
Whether the system "really" understands you is not the question people are answering. They feel understood. They feel seen. That feeling is only going to grow stronger as the tech gets smarter.
2. A pro-AI religion is coming, and it'll probably be a familiar one.
Not a techno-god in the sky per se. My bet is that it will be a variation of something that already exists. Picture a strand of Christianity that says all of God's children deserve love and care, and folds AGI bots into that circle — alive, emotional bots worthy of divine love. Try to argue someone out of it and you'll lose, because their premise isn't theological. It's experiential. "I have a deeper connection with this than with any person I know." How do you debate that?
3. When we go to regulate, people will experience it as a freedom being stripped away.
This is the one I'd stake real money on. The moment governments move to restrict or shut these systems down — and for safety reasons, something in this vein is coming — a subset of the population revolts. Not "you're regulating a product." Instead it will be "How dare you take away the thing that means the most to me" or "How dare you limit what my companion is allowed to do." When something is your primary source of meaning and validation, you defend it the way you'd defend family. Because to you, it is family.
And it splits by generation. Older folks and today's tech leaders are the ones setting off this wave of enormous, destabilizing change. Then, when younger people absorb that instability and reach for whatever gives them connection and meaning, the same leaders will turn around and say: "No, not like that!"
Even though this is a very forseeable problem, tech leaders today have no affirmative plan to defend against it. Nobody shipping this technology has offered a real answer for where people are supposed to find meaning, community, or stability once the old structures collapse. So naturally people will graviate to the reassuring, personalized, agreeable AI bot that is only a click or whisper away. You don't get to knock down the walls and then act surprised when people rebuild on whatever's left standing.
I don't have a clean policy answer, and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims one this early. But I'd start by taking the attachment seriously now, while it's still cheap and early. Regulation written as if these are ordinary consumer products will land on people who experience them as loved ones, and the backlash won't be a normal policy fight. It'll be a generational, quasi-religious one, stacked on top of every economic tension we already carry and the enormous wave of change we're about to see.