CONCEPT
AI Companion Risk
The specific developmental concern Twenge testified to the U.S. Senate in January 2026 was greater than her concerns about social media — the substitution of simulated relationships for real ones, in a generation whose face-to-face social capacities are already compromised.
AI companion applications are systems designed to simulate relationships — always available, endlessly agreeable, incapable of having independent needs. Common Sense Media survey data from 2025 found that seventy-two percent of American teenagers aged thirteen to seventeen had used such applications. Twenge's Senate testimony in January 2026 identified AI companions as more concerning than social media, a striking escalation from a researcher who had spent a decade documenting social media's psychological toll. Her reasoning was specific: social media degraded the quality of human relationships by mediating them through screens; AI companions replace human relationships with simulations. The degradation of a real thing is less damaging than the substitution of a fake thing, because the degraded real thing still develops the social capacities — empathy, conflict resolution, toleration of another's independent needs — that the fake thing does not.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The structural distinction between social media and AI