Sitting on a coffee table in his Chelsea office in New York City and surrounded by framed wedding invitations on the walls, Justin McLeod is worrying about AI.

Specifically, the founder and CEO of dating app Hinge was concerned that his users—many of whom have asked him to their weddings over the years—might fall in love with it instead of one another.

McLeod has spent the greater part of the past 15 years studying the dynamics of human relationships, including what makes one person fall for another, and he saw that chatbots offer exactly what many people crave.

“Why would I invest in these hard human relationships with people that are not always available or might reject me when I can talk to this thing that is right here and will always say the right thing?” he wonders on this sunny day in September.

Chatbots aren’t yet upending dating apps, but something sure is. Bumble, once the women-first darling, has shed 460,000 paying users since the end of 2024, prompting the return of founder Whitney Wolfe Herd in March. She’s embarked on an aggressive........

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