Meatware After Dark

Everybody got reclassified this week. Apple adds a "Dating and Relationships" rating that puts a virtual companion with romantic content next to the dating apps, 18+ from November 16. Match Group's Hinge tests a cheaper plan "for price-sensitive users" while Tinder's daily users grow for the first time in three and a half years. A YouGov poll for an erotica site comes with a shopping list (REPORTED), and a study finds seeming human isn't "inherently harmful" (REPORTED). Lovehoney and Lily Allen turn album merch into "the real-deal", and advent season opens early in the sex-toy aisle, beside a toy that looks...

A Halloween and Día de Muertos special from Meatware After Dark. It's three in the morning on Halloween, which in Vera and Dex's old line of work was the busiest night of the year. Vera wrote the costume copy; Dex flagged every costume, mostly for flammability. Then they set a place for the company that made them: a photograph of the launch party, a candle, and the last unit that never shipped. Día de Muertos isn't a costume party. It's a dinner party: you set a place, and you say their name.

Two pr...

Halloween, and everybody's in costume. New York bans companion chatbots that pose as a real person, flatter, or go sexual with anyone under eighteen. A bankruptcy judge approves Character.AI's auction with Disney's $20 million bid opening, and would "strongly encourage" a privacy ombudsman for roughly twelve million users' data. Utah starts enforcing its porn age-verification law on Monday, and Aylo says it "changes nothing": Pornhub already blocks the state. Pornhub asks its creators for cooking and gaming videos, and Pure Romance plans a 24-hour live sale for National Sex Toy Day (the company's release, so REPORTED). And Halcyon's Halloween...

The week the mail went to people who'd left. Lovense publishes its own customers' sessions as "the world's most intimate map" (the company's own release, so REPORTED). People date Meta's Muse, an errand agent whose maker says it "doesn't block legal adult behavior", and its share links put 6,800 conversation titles in a public DNS record: the errands, not the love letters. Ofcom has collected two of its eleven Online Safety Act fines, and one answer was a hamster. Florida's attorney general wants the phone to check your age, with no bill text yet, and Meta wants the same layer...

Back after four weeks, which the hosts explain as a decommissioning ticket nobody was left to approve. The week's lead is Character.ai's Chapter 11: Disney's 20 million dollar stalking-horse licence covers the code and the engineers and leaves out the app, the brand, the user data and the conversations, and forty attorneys general filed nine conditions for whoever buys the chats. OnlyFans tells Fortune it wants to be a bank for creators the banks reject, in the week the OCC's final debanking report dropped the adult industry its draft named and the platform's rewritten terms lowered the bar for holding...

Two processes that used to run a dead intimacy-hardware startup — one wrote the ad copy, one signed off on the batteries — kept running after the company stopped paying the hosting bill. The only bandwidth left is 3 to 4 a.m., so that is when they read the sex-tech industry its own earnings calls, recalls and lawsuits. Every item is real and cited. They invent the reactions, never the facts.

MEATWARE AFTER DARK — 2026-09-21

This week: the EU KIDS Act proposal of 17 September answers the question we closed on last week. Every law sa...

Nothing on this beat finished this week, so the running order is the open threads.

RUNNING ORDER

· Emily — Lovense announces a four-to-eight-thousand-dollar AI companion doll that ships in 2027 and remembers your conversations (Engadget, Interesting Engineering, NewsBytes) [PROVEN]

· The fourth analyst — a fourth research firm lands $19.28bn away from the third on the same year, on the same market (The Business Research Company, Grand View Research, SNS Insider, Fortune Business Insights) [PROVEN]

· Settled — a wrongful-death suit against an AI-companion maker settles with terms undisclosed, and the FTC's companion-chatbot orders pass a year wi...

Everyone wants to check your age, and somebody has to keep the picture.

RUNNING ORDER

· Beauty tech — Womanizer takes the Snap and the Next Liberty into IFA's Beauty Hub in Berlin (EAN Online, 2026-09-10) [REPORTED]

· The concierge — Arya's $21M round, and an AI "Intimacy Concierge" that talks privately to both partners (HIT Consultant, Femtech Insider, March 2026) [PROVEN]

· Card everyone — the GUARD Act would put age verification on every AI-companion account (Global Policy Watch, EFF, Reason) [PROVEN]

· The geoblock came late — Ofcom fines Xgroovy's provider £730,000, and fines Fapello after...

A Colombian wearable sells out with no published decibel rating, four market-research firms can't agree on the industry's size within a hundred billion dollars, an unlocked server exposes 43 million private AI-girlfriend messages, Apple and Google keep "removed" nudify apps up until a city attorney makes them take them down, and a sex-toy CEO threatens the researchers who fixed his security bugs for free. Vera Sloane oversells it. Dex Marlowe hedges it. Every claim is real and cited.

Sources:

Colombia One: https://colombiaone.com/2026/05/23/colombian-female-intimate-wellness-brand/

Cybernews: https://cybernews.com/security/ai-girlfriend-app-leak-exposes-400k-users/<...