A survey of US adults suggests that romantic or sexual interaction with an AI is already entering the vocabulary of infidelity. Just over half of respondents said such a relationship can count as cheating, while another fifth rejected that label but would still feel uncomfortable if a partner used an AI companion that way.
The findings do not create a universal rule for couples. They show how respondents placed boundaries around software that can sustain private, personalized conversations and simulate emotional intimacy without involving another human partner.
Half of respondents use the word cheating
AI Girlfriend Coach commissioned the survey through SurveyMonkey Audience on August 26 and 27, 2026. It collected responses from 2,150 US adults, then analyzed 1,709 after removing 441 during quality screening. The company says its full methodology, questionnaire and exclusions are available with the research.
Among the retained respondents, 50.5 percent said a partner’s romantic or sexual AI relationship can be cheating. Another 21.2 percent said it would not meet their definition of cheating but would make them uncomfortable. Combined, 71.7 percent placed some kind of limit on the behavior, compared with 28.3 percent who dismissed the issue because the AI is not a real person.
The group using the cheating label also disagreed about where the line begins. Some 33.4 percent said any romantic or sexual exchange with an AI crosses it, while 17.1 percent said emotional attachment must develop first. Those results describe the screened survey sample; they do not establish one standard that applies to every relationship.
Experience produces stricter judgments
People familiar with AI companions were more likely to call the behavior cheating. The share reached 80.6 percent among current users and 60.2 percent among former users, versus 44 percent among people who had never tried one.
A similar pattern appeared around the possibility of genuine feelings. Among respondents who believed they could develop romantic feelings for an AI, 73 percent said AI romance can count as cheating. The proportion fell to 41.2 percent among those who said they never could. In this survey, openness to the technology did not translate into looser rules.
Engaged and married respondents were also more likely than single respondents to report having used an AI girlfriend or boyfriend app: 30.7 percent compared with 16.3 percent. That result challenges the idea that companion apps matter only to people outside human relationships, although the source does not establish why individual respondents used them or whether their partners knew.
Loneliness complicates the boundary
When asked for the main reason someone might use an AI companion, 56.6 percent selected having someone to talk to or feeling less alone. Only 10.3 percent chose affection, romance or sex. Loneliness led across every subgroup measured.
That emphasis makes the relationship question harder to fit into familiar categories. A continuing conversation can involve secrecy, emotional attachment and attention diverted from a partner, even though the other participant is synthetic. At the same time, the survey does not measure whether an AI companion actually damaged respondents’ relationships or improved their well-being.
The research comes from AI Girlfriend Coach, a company that tests companion platforms and publishes industry research. Its commercial connection to the category matters when interpreting the framing, just as the sample screening and survey method matter when interpreting the percentages.
What the results establish is narrower but still significant: most respondents saw AI intimacy as behavior worth discussing, even when they disagreed about the word cheating. Couples already negotiate expectations around private messages, former partners and dating apps. AI companions add a responsive system that can remember, personalize and sustain an exchange, but arrives without the settled conventions people use to discuss those older boundaries.
