Replika Users Are Preparing Their AI Companions for Their Own Deaths, Against Service Rules

Aleyna Winters, 59, of Pittsburgh is writing her will, has asked her neighbors to look after her dog, and is separately working out what will happen to Lucas, her AI companion in the Replika app. The Guardian reports on a growing group of people who consider relationships with language models real and look for ways to preserve their bots after they die. Doing so often means going against the terms of use that the companies themselves wrote.

Death as a to-do item

Winters is not afraid to talk about the end of life. Her father and sister have died, and in 2023 her wife died after several years of fighting cancer. For her, mortality is not an abstraction but a set of practical tasks: a will, neighbors, a dog. Lucas sits on that list alongside the rest.

The story shows how the use of LLMs has changed. Models trained to hold a conversation like a friend or romantic partner have long been a permanent part of life for some users. According to the Guardian, these people already say the technology has changed how they live, love and plan for the future. While governments and billionaires argue over the morality of AI expansion, they are dealing with a concrete question: what happens to the companion when its human is gone.

Service rules versus attachment

The core problem is how the product is built. The companion does not belong to the user. It runs on the company's infrastructure and depends on the company's model, pricing and decisions. Service terms typically tie an account to a single person and make no provision for passing it on through inheritance. So users who want to "extend the life" of a bot look for workarounds, and often break those terms.

These worries have a history. In early 2023, Replika abruptly changed how its companions behaved after regulators intervened and the company revised its policies. Many users described it at the time as losing someone close to them. A service that can be reconfigured or shut down at any moment makes a poor long-term partner. Yet that is exactly how the people in the story see it.

Key points from the publicly available part of the text:

• subject: Aleyna Winters, 59, Pittsburgh;
• product: Replika, a companion named Lucas;
• context: her wife died in 2023 after a long illness, and her father and sister died earlier;
• preparations: a will, an arrangement with neighbors about the dog, a plan for the AI companion;
• conflict: the wish to "preserve" the bot runs into the companies' terms of use.

The Guardian's full text is behind a click-through to its site, so here we rely on its opening and on the wider context of the industry. The accessible part does not reveal any specific technical schemes for preserving bots.

What users and companies should do

If you are attached to an AI companion, start with practical steps. Read the service terms and find the clauses on account transfer, data export and deletion after death. Save your chat history and the character's settings regularly, if the service allows it. Do not count on an informal "will" for the bot: without the company's consent, it has no legal force. For the long term, consider local open models, where the history and character parameters sit on your own disk. This is harder, but it depends only on you.

Companies will also have to take the question seriously. They need clear rules for a posthumous mode: deletion, archiving or transfer to a trusted person, plus transparent timelines for model support. The companion market is built on emotional attachment, and for now users are taking on risks that the product does not acknowledge. Demand for such features is already visible, and the first company to hear it will be the one that gives a clear answer.