Young Life Finds a Third of Teens Now Keep an AI Friend

Researchers have finally put a number on something many teenagers already feel in their pockets: according to a new global survey from the Christian youth ministry Young Life, a Third of Teens aged thirteen to twenty-four say they now have an AI companion. And most of those young users told researchers the software is easier to confide in than some of the actual friends and family members in their lives.

The findings come from the RELATE Project 2026, the ministry's second wave of an international study of young people, which surveyed 7,105 people between November 2025 and January 2026 and followed the questionnaire with twenty-two focus groups involving ninety-seven participants. Eleven countries were covered, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Mexico, India and Nigeria, with five of them in Africa. Thirty-five percent of all respondents said they have an AI companion, but the figure climbs to nearly half among thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds and drops to twenty-nine percent among twenty-two- to twenty-four-year-olds. Young men were slightly more likely than young women to report one, thirty-eight percent to thirty-two. Sixty percent of companion users agreed, strongly or somewhat, that they feel more comfortable with the AI than with some friends or family members, and roughly one in ten adolescents said they manage stress by talking with a chatbot. Almost nine in ten respondents said they use AI in some form, most often for practical tasks, as reported by Christian Daily International.

The circle is shrinking while the preference for people grows

The most striking part of the report is not the chatbot number alone but the tension sitting next to it. The average number of close relationships young people reported fell from 5.3 in the 2023 wave to 4.4 in 2025, and on average respondents could name only two people they can talk to about the things that really matter. Four in ten said they were not fully confident there is an adult in their life who has a genuine interest in listening to them. For building trust with such an adult, confidentiality was the factor they ranked first, with seventy-three percent calling it extremely or very important, according to coverage by Drink of Jesus.

Yet the same young people who are opening up to software say they want more of the human kind of contact, not less. Sixty-four percent picked face-to-face communication as their preferred way of connecting with friends, up from fifty-four percent in the earlier research. That combination is the study's central paradox: a Third of Teens now keep an AI companion, but the longing for in-person connection is rising at the same time. "The RELATE Project tells us that while young people are constantly connected online, they are craving authentic, in-person community," Newt Crenshaw, the ministry's president and chief executive, said in the announcement. "They don't want perfect, frictionless screens. They are looking for trusted, consistent adults who will step into their worlds, earn and keep their trust, and simply be there to listen."

The human side of the data gets its clearest voice in the focus groups. A male participant in Zimbabwe described himself as the person other people turn to when things get hard, then added, "I'm the kind of person people go to when they're going through things, but very few people show up for me." After training his AI system to respond in ways he found useful, he said he sometimes used it during his lowest moments to have deeper conversations and work through problems. Technology, the researchers concluded, is increasingly filling gaps that already exist in relationships rather than creating those gaps, as ImNews Africa reported in its breakdown of the African findings.

The pushback: confiding is not the same as replacing

Not everyone reads the headline number the same way. Analysts at The Self Aware AI Desk argued that the survey deserves care in how it is framed, noting that having an AI companion, trusting it with a particular subject, and replacing a human relationship are different claims that the survey cannot make interchangeable. The sample is respondents to one eleven-country study, not a census of the world's young people, and most of the focus-group participants were ministry volunteers or staff, a group likely to hold particular views on relationships.

Still, the pattern fits what other recent research has found. GenZ NewZ's earlier look at the third-place boom found young adults actively hunting for live experiences and causes to show up for, even as a related survey found most Gen Zers relate to soft hermitting for reasons of money rather than mood. The thread running through all of it is rationing: young people are budgeting their money, their energy and now their emotional availability, and software that never judges and never sleeps is winning some of that budget by default.

What this means for you

If a chatbot has quietly become your most trusted listener, the study carries a practical warning alongside the validation. The organization's own researchers noted that human relationships require people to learn how to deal with conflict, disappointment, apology and reconciliation, things a chatbot is designed to spare you from. And privacy experts have long cautioned against sharing passwords, financial details, identity documents or private health information with conversational systems, because the model that comforts you tonight may also remember what you typed. None of that means the confidant on your phone is a villain. But if a Third of Teens now keep an AI companion, the adults around them might ask why the software feels safer than they do, and what it would take for the answer to change.