Bumble Warns Against AI Bots While Building Its Own AI

On May 5, Bumble founder and chief executive Whitney Wolfe Herd warned investors that people “falling in love with AI bots” was “not the future we want for ourselves or the next generation.” The remark came as the company reported a 14% revenue decline to $212 million for Q1 2026, and the app’s paying user base fell 21% to 3.2 million.

By then, Bumble had been testing Bee, its own AI assistant, in beta since March. Bee opens with a private conversation probing a user’s values, relationship goals, communication style, and dating intentions before recommending matches.

The 14% Drop Behind the Warning

Bumble’s Q1 2026 earnings press release filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, a proxy for operating cash flow) up 28.3% to $82.6 million, and net earnings up 165% to $52.6 million. Both improvements came from cost cuts. Revenue from the Bumble app and its parent Badoo brand fell from $247 million to $212 million year-over-year. Full-year 2025 revenue came in around $966 million, down from $1.07 billion in 2024.

Wolfe Herd, who returned as CEO in March 2025 after stepping back from the role, calls the paying-user decline a “deliberate reset,” shedding low-intent accounts to improve what she calls ecosystem health. The paying base shrank from roughly 4 million to 3.2 million across the year. Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, saw its paying subscriber count fall to 14.2 million in Q1 2025, its fifth consecutive quarter of decline; Tinder’s direct revenue dropped 7% in the same period. In the UK, Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble collectively shed 1.1 million users between May 2023 and May 2024, per a 2024 Ofcom report.

A 2025 Forbes Health survey found 78% of dating app users reported burnout from endless swiping without results. AppsFlyer, a mobile analytics firm, put the share of dating apps deleted within a month at 65% in 2024, rising to 69% in 2025. Singles haven’t stopped looking; Eventbrite data shared with Axios shows singles events on its platform doubled between 2022 and 2025, with 2024 event attendance up 85%.

In an Axios interview following the Q1 results, Wolfe Herd said users feel the swipe “degraded their love lives.”

Bee and the Line Bumble Is Drawing

Bee was announced at Bumble’s Q4 2025 earnings on March 11, 2026. The assistant conducts private onboarding conversations to assess users’ values, relationship goals, lifestyle, and communication style, then surfaces compatible matches through a feature called “Dates.” Future capabilities include anonymous feedback from prior matches and date suggestions. On the May 5 call, the company described the central friction as “the gap between online interaction and real-world connection.”

AI should never replace human authenticity or human connection.

Bumble’s founder and CEO said this on the May 5 earnings call, drawing a specific line between the AI companion category and what Bumble is building. The company’s position is that Bee exists to produce a date between two real people. Apps like Replika, Character.AI, and Nomi don’t need one; their business models work without it.

The operational mechanics sit closer together than that distinction suggests. Both Bee and companion apps gather personal emotional data through extended AI conversations, learn what users want from a relationship, and build detailed conversational profiles over time. Companion apps, unlike Bee, keep control of that conversation indefinitely.

Bumble is also removing the swipe in select markets starting Q4 2026, replacing it with “chapter-based” profiles meant to reflect a user’s full story. “When we reduce friction at the moments that matter most, we help people connect with clarity and confidence,” Bumble CTO Vivek Sagi said in February 2026. Tinder is testing Chemistry, which draws on users’ camera rolls to suggest matches. Grindr’s Edge subscription offers AI conversation summaries and compatibility scores. The whole category is moving toward AI-assisted matching; Bumble’s version gates the journey on an in-person date.

220 Million Downloads

Appfigures, a mobile intelligence firm, tracked AI companion app activity through July 2025 across both major app stores and found:

• 220 million cumulative global downloads as of July 2025
• 88% year-over-year download growth in H1 2025
• $221 million in global consumer spending
• 337 active, revenue-generating apps; 128 launched in 2025 alone

The top 10% of apps generate 89% of category revenue, a winner-take-most structure typical of app-store markets. Revenue per download more than doubled between 2024 and 2025, from $0.52 to $1.18. Character.AI reported 233 million registered users as of April 2026. The app that pioneered commercial AI companionship in 2017 has passed 40 million cumulative users; a voice add-on it shipped in 2026 with ElevenLabs drove a reported 20% improvement in 7-day retention for paid users, per the vendor.

The market’s trajectory shows how quickly the category matured. That pioneering platform launched a romantic mode in 2020 with roughly 500,000 users. Pandemic isolation pushed category growth to an estimated 300% by 2021. ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch put conversational AI into mainstream awareness, and an estimated 50 million people worldwide spent Valentine’s Day 2026 with an AI companion, per platform estimates compiled around that date.

Two Camps, One Loneliness

Tinder, Grindr, and Bumble are building AI assistants that conduct onboarding interviews and recommend compatible real-world matches. Character.AI, Replika, Nomi, and Kindroid have built persistent AI companions designed to be the relationship. The same demand for connection drives both categories.

Dating platforms’ models cap out when users succeed; a companion app’s ideal user never needs to leave. Character.AI’s user base skews 57% aged 18 to 24, with those users averaging 1.5 hours in the app daily. Patterns like those are examined in research on how digital platforms shape emotional attachment, which finds that apps designed to increase connection can sometimes intensify loneliness instead.

On May 5, the CEO said “we are on our phones more than we’ve ever been on our phones before” and that “the need for human connection and love is greater right now than ever. We are more disconnected.”

How Dating Apps Made the Market

A 2025 study in JMIR Formative Research by Eric Balki at Lancaster University found that dating app algorithms produce “gambler tendencies” through compulsive engagement design, linking sustained use to depression, anxiety, and loneliness, particularly among men. Cela and Wood’s 2026 systematic review found significant negative associations between swiping-based app use and self-esteem, body image, and psychological well-being, with the authors describing the cumulative pattern as “swiping fatigue.”

In 2024, six users filed a class action against Match Group alleging its apps were designed to be addictive despite Hinge’s own tagline of being “designed to be deleted.” The suit was forced into arbitration before year-end 2024.

The Aalto University study, presented at CHI 2026 (the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), analyzed Reddit posts from nearly 2,000 active AI companion users over two years. Heavy users showed more loneliness, depression, and suicidal-thought signals over time than comparison groups. “Users’ posts increasingly revolved around relationships, but contained more signals of loneliness, depression and suicidal thoughts than comparison groups,” doctoral researcher Yunhao Yuan said. Talayeh Aledavood, a researcher on the study’s team, pointed to the mechanism: AI companions offer “unconditional support,” raising the perceived cost of maintaining human relationships over time. Users stop reaching out to people entirely.

The Regulatory Pressure Building

Five states passed or advanced new AI companion legislation in Q1 2026, according to an April 2026 review of the AI companion market, covering disclosure obligations, crisis intervention requirements, and, in Tennessee, developer liability for harm caused by emotional simulation, a standard with no equivalent in existing dating app law.

The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), being phased in through 2026, includes provisions targeting AI that exploits psychological vulnerabilities or manipulates user behavior. Legal scholars have debated whether companion apps designed to foster emotional dependency fall within those provisions, and the question has no settled answer yet.

Eugenia Kuyda, Replika’s founder, stepped down as CEO in 2025 and in February 2026 told MindSite News the platform considers itself the category leader, declaring “we are the Coca-Cola” of AI companions. Bumble hasn’t addressed publicly whether its Bee onboarding conversations, which collect personal data about users’ emotional needs and relationship goals, would face any of the same scrutiny. The rebuilt, AI-enabled platform reaches select markets starting Q4 2026. The AI assistant at its core has been in beta since March.