The Walt Disney Co. has agreed to pay $20 million for a non-exclusive, perpetual license to Character.ai's intellectual property.
What is Character.ai's intellectual property, exactly?
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2026
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Fuck AI
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20 million is basically nothing
Who knows but can we afford to miss out?
Woah. Honestly, character AI was I think the second most profitable thing in AI after enterprise AI. Like, horny and lonely folks are the most vulnerable people and are heavily exploited ones too. If you cannot make that a viable buisness, this is really a bad signal for all AI buisnesses.
Company that doesn't make money goes bankrupt. Who could have seen that coming?
Too small to ask for a government bailout.
The first domino falls
I'm happy to report, this isn't the first domino. That would probably be Oracle's Project Jupiter.
One would think that it would be pretty easy to turn a business model based on theft and exploitation into something profitable, but the AI industry proves that you can rip people off and go bankrupt at the same time.
I guess they forgot the part where they go public and hand gullible retail investors the bag.
And all that data they accumulated during their run will be sold off to the highest bidder. Some new company who you'll have no idea what they'll do with that data...
You know, all that usage data that you agreed to give Character.ai? All the records of your conversations, your profile, interests, personal secrets? That they said they dont sell to third parties?
Well, that was then, this is now. The liquidator dont care about your agreed on ToS. That's not a real contract.
Pop that bubble! 😍
There's also a Techcrunch article that had this bit of insight:
It also shows that consumer-facing AI products are really hard to scale and monetize. Character.AI was one of the top apps in terms of time spent, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower. But high engagement can be a double-edged sword; AI costs rise the more people use the app, which consequently also increases the pressure to monetize users.
Going to say right now that this should not have existed in the first place, that way I'm not mincing words.
I wonder if this will lead to noticeably higher suicide rates among users of the app? I remember when they just slightly changed how the characters talk to users and people acted like their grandma got shot.
I think that was chatgpt 3.1? But id imagine yes. Unfortunately these bloodsuckers are making money off of lonelyness, and when the feed runs dry theyre smacked with emotion which many cannot handle.
Maybe when they turned off GPT 4o.
Oh yes that was what it was. Pardon me, I actively avoid AI dev news like the plague.
Now now... this isn't Replika.
So it begins...
Ah, so happy for them, filing for bankruptcy is such a good look for them! I can't wait to see a lot of the other services start to domino fall. Go AI, go broke as all the knowledgeable people say. ROFLMAO
Good.
well this was definitely one of the weirder services out there. and disney's paying 20 million for it? that's the real headline lmao can't wait to find out how they manage to resell it to our kids. horrifying
let it be the first of many
Trying to escape from actually being held accountable for the harms they've caused. Scum is as scum does.
reminder that the people that constantly use these sites would probably shame you for being in like an rp server
They've been around (and somewhat notorious) for a long time, even before "AI" became a popular term.
:)
Reopens as "characters . ai"
Woe.