Character.ai

Character.ai is a chatbot service where users talk to AI characters, whether ones they create themselves or ones made by others, including fictional figures and celebrity-style personas. It launched to the public in 2022 and its audience skewed young, mostly aged 16 to 30.

It was founded in November 2021 by Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, two former Google engineers. It raised a reported $43 million in seed funding and a $150 million round in March 2023 that valued it at about $1 billion. In August 2024 Google hired Shazeer and De Freitas and took a non-exclusive licence to its technology; Karandeep Anand, a former Meta executive, became CEO in June 2025.

The company has faced lawsuits over harm to minors, beginning with a Florida mother's October 2024 suit over her 14-year-old son's death, which was settled in January 2026 together with Google. Kentucky's attorney general sued in January 2026. It barred under-18 users from open-ended chat with characters from 25 November 2025. Its blog later reported a voluntary Chapter 11 filing on 12 October 2026, after the February 2026 date of the story that named it.