Organization
Character.AI
Consumer products · Model developer · Palo Alto, California
Character.AI runs a consumer chat app in which people talk by text or voice with AI characters created by users. It post-trains open models from other developers for its product, including CAI-Image, a family of image models post-trained from Qwen-Image.163
Status: In August 2024 Character.AI entered into an agreement with Google under which it gave Google a non-exclusive license to its then-current LLM technology, and its two co-founders and certain members of its research team joined Google; Character.AI said most of its team would remain to build its product. The announcement describes a license and hiring arrangement, not an acquisition. In September 2026 Character.AI and Disney announced that members of Character.AI's technical team are expected to join Disney; neither announcement describes an acquisition, and Character.AI said its app remains live.345
Key facts
- Ownership
- Privately held
- Legal form
- Unknown
- Headquarters
- Palo Alto, California2
- Founded
- Unknown
What is and isn’t public
Character.AI's models are used inside its hosted app, and its September 2026 post on CAI-Image does not describe a weights release. Its GitHub organization publishes some code, including the Ovi audio-video generation project (Apache-2.0 repository, built by Character AI and Yale researchers, with its video branch initialized from Wan2.2).678
Products
Hosted model products
Labeled Closed product/API — this describes how a documented product is delivered (hosted access). It is not an open artifact and says nothing about other releases by the same organization.
| Product | Kind | Documented delivery and access | Reviewed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Character.AI (external site: apps.apple.com) | Assistant app | Chat app for text and voice conversations with AI characters and for creating characters; the iPhone app is rated 18+ and is free with optional paid subscriptions.1 | Sep 29, 2026 |
Related open artifacts
No open-artifact records in this catalog list Character.AI. That is not evidence that none exist — only that none have been reviewed here.
Notable documented facts
- In its 2024 announcement Character.AI said it would make greater use of third-party LLMs alongside its own models and focus its resources on post-training and product work.3
In the news
Members of Character.AI's technical team are expected to join Disney
On September 18, 2026, Character.AI and The Walt Disney Company announced that members of Character.AI's technical team are expected to join Disney. Neither announcement describes an acquisition or a licensing agreement, and Character.AI said its app remains live. The move has only been announced, and the Character.AI record still lists the company as privately held with no parent organization.
U.S. eligibility
Eligible · basis: U.S. headquarters
The headquarters label rests on the EU trader information shown on the Ireland App Store listing for the Character.AI app, in which Character Technologies, Inc. identifies itself as a trader and gives an address at 301 High St, Palo Alto, California, United States; the listing does not describe this address as a headquarters. The 2024 agreement with Google was a non-exclusive license and hiring arrangement, not a transfer of ownership, and the September 2026 Character.AI and Disney announcements describe team members moving to Disney without describing an acquisition, so eligibility rests on the company's own U.S. location. Character.AI's main website blocks automated access, so its terms could not be read for this review.2345
Sources
This listing is not an endorsement or a federal approval.