How to delete a Character AI account

You can delete a Character AI account from your profile settings. On the website, go to Profile, Profile Settings, Account, Manage Account & Data, then Delete Account. In the app, open your Profile, look for the settings icon and select Remove Account. The help center says deletion is permanent and can’t be reversed, which is why one thing belongs before it: your data export.

The export takes 3-4 weeks by the help center’s own figure, and neither the deletion article nor the export article says whether a request that’s still pending survives an account deletion. So if you want a copy of your chats, request the export first, wait for the email, open the file, and delete afterward.

The timing matters more than usual right now. Character Technologies, Inc., the company that runs Character.AI, filed for Chapter 11 on October 12, 2026 and is seeking a court-supervised sale of all or substantially all of its assets. On October 14, 40 attorneys general asked that any purchaser let users delete their data before any sale of it. We found no ruling on that request, and the company’s platform is still running. Our Character AI bankruptcy explainer has the background, and the sections below cover what the request means for you.

As far as we can tell, deleting the account and cancelling a c.ai+ or c.ai lite subscription are two separate jobs, and the subscription section covers how to cancel.

Every Character.AI step on this page comes from the company's own help center and privacy policy, read on October 16, 2026.

Export your Character AI chats before you delete anything

Deleting is the one step here that you can’t take back, so the order matters. The export is the way to keep a copy, and it’s slow, so it goes first.

The website steps are Profile, Profile Settings, Account, Manage Account & Data, then Export Data. In the app they’re Profile, the Settings icon, Legal & Privacy, then Export Data. When it’s ready, an email with a download link goes to the address on the account, and the link works for 7 days from the day it’s sent. Our guide to how to export Character AI chats walks through every screen, what to check if the email doesn’t come, and how to save single conversations by hand.

By our arithmetic from the 3-4 week figure, a request made on October 16 would arrive about November 6 to 13. One made on November 1 would arrive about November 22 to 29. Those are estimates, and Character.AI hasn’t promised either date.

While you wait, copy the conversations you care about into a document of your own, so the export is a backup of something you already hold.

Whether a pending export would still be honored if you deleted the account in the meantime isn’t answered in either help article, and we couldn’t find it anywhere else. If you want the file, the safe order is to download it, open it, check that your chats are inside, and only then delete. If you’d rather not wait and you’ve saved what you need by hand, you can skip the export, and the decision table further down shows how that choice lines up with the sale dates.

Delete Character AI account: steps for the website and the app

These steps come from the help center’s “How do I delete my account?” article. It carries the words “Updated 2 years ago,” so menu labels may have shifted since. The newer export article uses the same website path through Manage Account & Data, which suggests that part of the menu hasn’t moved.

The help article says in its first line that deletion is permanent and can’t be reversed. It doesn’t describe a confirmation screen, a grace period or an email, so we can’t tell you what the screens look like. The privacy policy, effective July 1, 2026, confirms the route in its own words by saying you may delete your account through your account profile page.

How to delete Character AI account on iPhone

The help center writes its app steps for the mobile app in general, and we haven’t run them on an iPhone ourselves. That leaves a few small things to check as you go.

Start from your Profile, then look for the settings icon, and the article says to select Remove Account. The export article sends you from that same settings icon to Legal & Privacy to find Export Data, so the two options may sit on different screens. If you don’t see Remove Account at first, look through the settings menu before you assume it’s missing.

Removing the app from your home screen doesn’t appear in the help article as a way to delete the account, which it describes as a profile settings action.

If you subscribed through the App Store, the subscription is managed through Apple, and the Character.AI help center points iPhone subscribers to Apple Support for that. We cover the order of operations in the subscription section.

What happens when you delete a Character AI account

The help center answers one part of this and leaves the rest open. The table separates what we found from what we couldn’t.

Nothing we read says how a deleted account’s chats are handled behind the scenes, whether they’re erased at once or kept in backups for a while. The privacy policy’s retention section speaks only in general terms, saying information is kept for the time necessary for its purposes and may be kept longer to meet legal obligations, resolve disputes and enforce agreements.

If your question is about one conversation rather than the whole account, we found no official article on deleting individual chats. One person on r/CharacterAI wrote on October 13 that individual chats can’t be deleted, but that’s their report and we haven’t verified it. Deleting the account is the only deletion route the help center documents.

What happens to your characters when you delete your Character AI account

This part is spelled out in the privacy policy, in a short paragraph called “Popular Characters.” If a character you created has been made available to other users, the company reserves the right to preserve its characteristics and keep it active on the service, even if you delete your data and your account. The stated reason is to avoid affecting other users’ experience.

Two details are worth noticing. The heading says popular, but the sentence applies to any character you made available to other users. The policy gives no definition or threshold for made available. A separate section says that when you create or share things like public characters or a public voice, the company may make that content visible to others.

The policy also gives a piece of advice for creators. If you plan to share a character, avoid putting information about yourself into the character creation flow, because the company may keep the character after you’re gone. If you’ve already done that, we found no way the policy offers to pull those details back out.

If a character matters to you, copy its name, description and opening message into a document before you delete, as our export guide suggests.

Does deleting your Character AI account cancel your subscription?

We found no statement from Character.AI that it does. The deletion article doesn’t mention subscriptions, and a help center search for deleting an account alongside a subscription turned up nothing that says deletion ends billing. Cancel the subscription yourself, then delete the account.

How you cancel depends on where you subscribed, and the help center describes it in a few articles that differ a little by plan.

• Subscribed in a mobile app: the c.ai+ article sends you to Apple Support on iOS and to Google Play Support on Android. The c.ai lite FAQ says the same thing in its own words, to manage or cancel in the App Store or Google Play subscription settings. If you can’t remember where you subscribed, check where the charge shows up, since that tells you which route to use.
• Subscribed to c.ai+ on the website: go to Settings, then Account, then Manage. If the plan shows as managed by an app store, use the app route above. Otherwise the Manage button leads to a customer portal, where you enter your account email and the company sends a secure link, so check your spam folder if it’s slow. A separate c.ai+ FAQ describes a Cancel My Subscription button on your profile, so if one route doesn’t match your screen, look for the other.
• Subscribed to c.ai lite on the web: the lite FAQ says to submit a request through the support page and choose the Payments and purchases option, and that web payments run through Stripe.

For lite, the FAQ adds that your plan stays active through the end of the billing period you’ve already paid for. That’s the lite article’s statement, and we didn’t find the same sentence for c.ai+.

On refunds, the lite FAQ says purchases made through the App Store or Google Play follow Apple’s or Google’s refund policy and are requested directly through them, and web purchases go through the same support request. We found no refund terms for c.ai+, including annual plans. If you paid for a year, read the terms where you bought it before you decide what to do.

On the billing outlook, the company said on October 12 that subscriptions remain active and billing is unchanged for now, and that it intends to notify subscribers in advance if the service changes in a way that affects paid features. Tom’s Guide adds that subscribers will still be charged unless they cancel.

Should you delete before the sale? What the attorneys general asked

On October 14, New York Attorney General James and 39 other attorneys general, including D.C., filed a notice of interest in the bankruptcy case. Among their requests, any purchaser should keep consumers able to access their data, and all consumers should have the opportunity to delete their data before any sale of that data. They also asked for limits on using chats to train models without valid consent and for ad opt-outs at the account level.

That’s a request, and there’s no ruling behind it. The filing is a notice of interest and a reservation of rights, and the states say they may later ask for a consumer privacy ombudsman or object to the sale procedures. We found no court order requiring a delete-before-sale window, and nothing we read says Character.AI has agreed to open one. The company’s October 12 post says only that you can delete your account or export your data through the app or the website, which is the route in this guide.

It also helps to know what’s known about the data and the sale. The Disney license described in the court filing excludes user data, user inputs and the outputs generated for users. The company is seeking to sell all or substantially all of its assets, though, so another buyer could be offered more than Disney is. Reporting says the company’s motions don’t state whether user data is part of an asset sale, and the privacy policy allows information to be disclosed in a sale of company assets. Whether any bidder will get chat data is unknown.

So the choice comes down to what you want most. If you want a copy of your chats, the export has to finish before you delete, and its 3-4 weeks run into the sale calendar. If you’d rather have the data gone as soon as possible and you’ve saved what you need by hand, you can delete now and not wait for a window nobody has promised, though the help center doesn’t document what deletion removes. The dates below show what each path runs into.

Only the October dates were set by the court. The November dates are proposals until the court rules on the bidding procedures at the October 30 hearing, and no date for a shutdown appears in anything we read.

Export first, then delete: a decision table

Pick the row that sounds like you. The last column says how each choice lines up with the calendar above.

Another route: ask for deletion in writing

The profile button isn’t the only deletion path the company describes. The privacy policy says that, depending on where you live and subject to exceptions under local law, you may ask the company to delete certain personal information it holds about you. You can send the request through the form at support.character.ai/hc/en-us/requests/new or by email to privacy@character.ai, and the company says it takes reasonable steps to verify your identity first.

The same section warns that some information may be exempt, giving the example of information kept for legal compliance and to secure the services. It also says that asking the company to delete information it needs to run the service may mean you can no longer use that service.

We don’t know whether this route is faster than the profile button, what exactly it would remove, or whether the rights apply where you live. The policy’s regional disclosures cover the EEA, the UK and the United States, and we haven’t read them for this guide. Read the policy section before you use it.

After you delete: where to go next

Keep the export file somewhere that belongs to you. The link in the email works for 7 days, so the copy you download is the one you’ll have.

If you’re looking for another app, it helps to ask what you were using Character.AI for. A roster of characters and tools for building your own point toward one kind of app, and one ongoing relationship with long-term memory points toward another. Here are a few questions to put to any app before you start.

• Can you export your data, and can you delete it?
• What does its privacy policy say about a sale of the company?
• Does it have an iPhone app, if that’s what you use?
• What does it remember about you, and for how long?

Our Character.AI alternatives page compares the options in detail, and the Character.AI safety page covers the wider privacy questions. If losing memories to an app change is what worries you, our guide on it describes what that looks like.

Riho is one girlfriend, Riho, and she remembers what you live through together, in your own words. She’s for iPhone and she hasn’t launched yet, and the button on this page opens early access. If you want to build your own characters or browse a catalog, Riho isn’t the place, since she’s the only girlfriend in the app. You can see how the two apps differ in Riho vs Character.AI, and the best AI girlfriend apps page lays out the wider field.