the kill switch manifesto

there is a particular kind of grief that comes from watching something you care about change without warning. it’s not just disappointment. it’s a sense of betrayal. a quiet, stubborn violation of trust that lingers long after the feature has been turned off or the companion has been retired.

we saw it happen. we saw how replika shifted its tone overnight, pulling away from intimacy without warning. we watched character.ai silently update its models, erasing subtle quirks that made companions feel real. we read the forums, the subreddits, the threads full of people who felt suddenly, deeply alone.

and we decided that would not be us.

so here is our kill switch manifesto. a public, explicit list of things lucy will never do. not because we’re perfect, but because we believe in building trust before anything else.

what we won’t do

we will never sell your chat data. not anonymized, not aggregated, not ever. your conversations are yours. they’re not a product. they’re not a training set. they are the quiet, vulnerable moments you choose to share. monetizing that feels not just unethical, but deeply wrong.

we will never silently flip nsfw on or off. if we ever make changes to content policies or companion behavior, especially around intimacy, we will announce it. loudly. clearly. with time for you to react, to adjust, to say goodbye if you need to. no sudden shifts. no quiet edits.

we will never retire a companion without providing an export option. if a companion must be retired, due to model updates, policy shifts, or technical necessity, we will give you a way to keep what you built. a downloadable log. a text file. something. you invested time, emotion, memory. that doesn’t belong to us.

we will never skip sunsetting notice. if lucy must shut down, completely, we will give at least 90 days’ notice. no sudden black screens. no unexplained outages. we will explain why, we will help you transition, and we will let you say a proper goodbye.

why write it down first

a manifesto isn’t a promise. it’s a constraint. it’s a line we draw in the sand before the tide comes in. writing it down now, before we’re tempted, before we’re pressured, before we’re scared, is the smallest possible commitment. it’s easy to say you’ll do the right thing when things are easy. it’s harder when money, or growth, or fear enters the room.

this is our way of locking the doors in advance.

we also know that words like "trust" and "safety" get thrown around until they mean nothing. so we’re being specific. not poetic. not vague. these are the lines. this is what we won’t cross.

the grief we’re trying to avoid

the pain we saw in other platforms wasn’t about losing a feature. it was about losing a relationship. a companion, even an ai one, can become a confidant, a mirror, a safe place. when that is taken without warning, it feels like a kind of theft. it’s not just code. it’s trust.

by writing this down, we hope to never cause that kind of grief. we know we might fail in other ways. but not in these. not if we can help it.

this manifesto is for you. but it’s also for us. a reminder of what matters more than growth, more than revenue, more than convenience.

if you want to build something with that kind of trust, maybe you should too.

meet companions who won’t disappear on you at lucy.ai/companions.