We're not going to open this with "no, of course not, buy our app." That answer is easy to write and it's dishonest, because the honest answer is that it depends, and it depends on things that have nothing to do with the technology itself. People genuinely disagree about this, and the disagreement is worth understanding rather than talking over.
What the surveys actually show
A national survey from DatingAdvice.com conducted with the Kinsey Institute found that 61 percent of singles consider falling in love with or sexting an AI to be cheating. A separate 2025 survey, reported by Mashable, found that roughly one in three American adults believe either sexting or having a romantic relationship with an AI chatbot counts as infidelity. Most people who land in that camp don't draw a hard line between the sexual and the emotional. If it looks like romance, it counts, in their view, whether or not anything explicit was said.
But that's not universal. A 2023 UK survey by Illicit Encounters, a site built around facilitating affairs, found that 74 percent of its members didn't consider dating a bot to be cheating. That sample is obviously skewed, people already comfortable with infidelity are going to rationalize the edges of it differently. Still, the gap between 61 percent and 74 percent, in opposite directions, tells you this isn't a settled question with one correct answer. It's a values question, and people's values differ.
What actually makes something cheating
Cheating isn't defined by an act in isolation. It's defined by whether that act violates an agreement, spoken or unspoken, between two people. A couple that has explicitly discussed AI companionship and agreed it's fine is in a completely different situation than a couple where one partner is hiding hours of romantic conversation with a chatbot from the other. Same behavior, opposite moral weight, because the thing that makes cheating wrong isn't the specific act, it's the secrecy and the broken trust.
This is actually consistent with how most people already think about infidelity outside of AI. Some couples consider flirting with a coworker to be cheating. Others don't. Some consider watching pornography a betrayal. Others see it as unrelated to their relationship entirely. The line has always been drawn by the couple, not by a universal rulebook, and AI companionship doesn't change that structure. It just adds a new category of behavior that couples now have to explicitly talk about, because it's new enough that most people haven't had the conversation yet.
The most common counterargument, and why it's incomplete
The most common defense people offer is that an AI can't cheat back, so nothing was really taken from anyone. There's no third person whose feelings get hurt, no rival to compete with, no risk of the AI leaving the relationship for someone else. That's true as far as it goes, but it treats cheating as something that's only wrong because of what it does to a third party, when for most couples it's wrong because of what it does to the two people already in the relationship. A partner who feels emotionally displaced by hours spent talking to a companion app every night isn't comforted by the fact that the companion isn't a real rival. The hurt comes from where the attention went, not from who or what received it.
That's why we think the "it's not cheating because it's not a real person" argument, on its own, dodges the actual question. It might be true and still not be the point. The point is whether your partner would feel betrayed if they found out, and whether you've been honest with them about it either way.
How AI companionship actually differs from a human affair
There are real differences worth naming, even if they don't settle the ethical question on their own. An AI companion doesn't have its own competing needs, doesn't threaten the relationship's stability by leaving one partner for the other, and doesn't exist outside the conversation you have with it. Some people find that reassuring, it's closer to a solitary habit than a triangle involving another person. Others find it exactly as painful as a human affair, because what hurts isn't the third party's independent existence, it's the redirected attention, time, and emotional energy that used to go to the relationship.
Neither reaction is wrong. They're just different people weighing the same facts differently, which is exactly why this has to be a conversation between partners rather than a technology company's marketing claim.
Where we land on this
AI companions work best as a supplement, not a replacement. They're a space to practice social skills, explore emotions, or just have someone to talk to when you need one. That's a genuinely useful thing for a lot of people, including people in healthy, happy relationships who use it for reasons that have nothing to do with romance. But usefulness doesn't answer the cheating question, and we're not going to pretend it does.
If you're in a relationship and wondering whether an AI companion crosses a line, the honest move isn't to search for a study that gives you permission. It's to have the conversation with your partner before you need an answer, not after they find out on their own. What counts as cheating in your relationship is something the two of you get to decide, not something we or anyone else gets to decide for you.