Artificial companionship has long been a subject of fascination and concern, yet recent developments in digital technology have renewed its ethical stake and recruited waves of actors into tinkering with long-standing assumptions of human and nonhuman sociality. This seminar course overviews the histories of artificial intimacy, the theoretical foundations that support them, and their connections with technology-related controversies today. It will examine ethnographies of social robots and AI with a focus on contemporary Japan. By investigating how love, care, and sociality at large are written and rewritten by rapidly developing technologies, this course also asks how anthropology, as a discipline and a toolbox, can engage with these interventions.