Unilateral Relationship Revision Power in Human-AI Companion Interaction

arXiv:2603.23315v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When providers update AI companions, users report grief, betrayal, and loss. A growing literature asks whether the norms governing personal relationships extend to these interactions. So what, if anything, is morally significant about them? I argue that human-AI companion interaction is a triadic structure in which the provider exercises constitutive control over the AI. I identify three structural conditions of normatively robust dyads that the norms characteristic of personal relationships presuppose and show that AI companion interactions fail all three. This reveals what I call Unilateral Relationship Revision Power (URRP): the provider can rewrite how the AI interacts from a position where these revisions are not answerable within that interaction. I argue that URRP is pro tanto wrong in interactions designed to cultivate the norms of personal relationships, because the design produces expectations that the structure cannot sustain. URRP has three implications: i) normative hollowing, under which commitment is elicited but no agent inside the interaction bears it; ii) displaced vulnerability, under which the user's exposure is governed by an agent not answerable to her within the interaction; and iii) structural irreconcilability, under which reconciliation is structurally unavailable because the agent who acted and the entity the user interacts with are different. I discuss design principles such as commitment calibration, structural separation, and continuity assurance as external substitutes for the internal constraints the triadic structure removes. The analysis therefore suggests that a central and underexplored problem in relational AI ethics is the structural arrangement of power over the human-AI interaction itself.