Just over half of American adults now say a partner’s romantic or sexual relationship with an AI can count as cheating, according to a survey of 2,150 U.S. adults run by AI Girlfriend Coach through SurveyMonkey Audience in late August. After quality screening removed 441 responses, analysts examined 1,709 remaining answers and found 50.5% willing to apply the word ‘cheating’ to AI intimacy. Another 21.2% wouldn’t use that exact term but said they’d still be uncomfortable with a partner doing it, pushing the share placing some kind of limit to 71.7%.
Infidelity norms assume a third person who can be confronted or left, and AI romance removes that person while keeping most of what surrounds them: secrecy, emotional attachment, sexual content, and a substantial share of someone’s attention going somewhere their partner cannot see. Relationship researchers have long treated emotional infidelity as damaging in its own right, and AI companions land squarely in that category while generating chat logs and images that resemble the sexual kind. Neither category couples usually argue from quite covers it. Regulators have run into the same gap—China’s rules on anthropomorphic AI services took effect on 15 July 2026, while California and New York already have companion-chatbot legislation on the books, though the emphasis there falls on minors and crisis handling rather than what these products do inside adult partnerships.
The survey undercuts the assumption that this mainly concerns single people. Engaged and married respondents were nearly twice as likely as single ones to have used an AI girlfriend or boyfriend app—30.7% against 16.3%. That’s a striking inversion of the lonely-single-stereotype, and it suggests these tools are being adopted inside relationships, not as a substitute for them.
The most counterintuitive finding is who judges AI romance most harshly. Among respondents open to developing genuine romantic feelings for an AI, 73.0% said AI romance can count as cheating, versus 41.2% of those who said they never could. Current AI companion users called it cheating at 80.6%, former users at 60.2%, and people who had never tried one at 44.0%. Once someone accepts that feelings directed at an AI can be genuine, the distinction between a real and an artificial relationship stops doing much work in deciding whether a boundary has been crossed. The people with firsthand experience apply the firmest rules. That pattern mirrors what happened with social media in the 2010s—early adopters were often the first to recognize what the technology was doing to them.
