How to export Character AI chats

You can export your Character AI chats from inside your account, on the website or in the app, and the company emails you a download link when the file is ready. On the website, go to Profile, Profile Settings, Account, Manage Account & Data, then Export Data. In the app, open Profile, tap the Settings icon, then Legal & Privacy, then Export Data.

The help center says exports can take 3-4 weeks to process, and the link in the email works for 7 days from the day it’s sent. That timing matters now because Character Technologies, the company that runs Character.AI, filed for Chapter 11 on October 12, 2026 and is selling its assets through a court process. By our arithmetic, a request made on October 15 would arrive about November 5 to November 12, which is ahead of the November 24 sale hearing the company has proposed.

So do both things. Request the official export today, because it has the longest wait. While you wait, copy the chats you care about most into a document of your own, so you have them even if the email is late.

Is Character AI shutting down?

No shutdown date has been confirmed. In its October 12 blog post, Character.AI says the platform remains up and running and that you can keep using all of its services for now. The same post describes a court-supervised sale of the company and says that if no bid is available that keeps the platform operating, the platform will be wound down. Nothing we read gives a date for that outcome.

October 15 is the date many people are searching for, and we couldn’t find it in the company’s blog post, its press release, the court filings or the news coverage we read. The Reddit threads we read from October 14 don’t cite it either. One thread that day was titled “So it’s not shutting down?” because the poster was getting conflicting answers from different sides of the community.

The dates that do exist come from the court, so it helps to know what the sale is. Character Technologies, Inc. filed a voluntary Chapter 11 case in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware (Case No. 26-11603) and wants to sell all or substantially all of its assets. Disney Worldwide Services is the stalking horse bidder, which means its offer sets the starting point and other bidders can top it. That offer is $20 million for a non-exclusive, perpetual license to some company technology and patents, plus certain claims the company has against former employees who joined Disney. The company expects the sale to finish by the end of November or perhaps early December, and the Disney agreement lets Disney walk away if the sale hasn’t closed by December 17.

The company hasn’t said yet whether a buyer would keep existing conversations or user-made characters, or whether any feature will be cut. Subscriptions stay active for now, and the company says it intends to notify subscribers in advance if changes affect paid features.

Only the October 23 and October 30 dates below were set by the court. The November dates are the company’s proposals until the court rules on the bidding procedures at the October 30 hearing.

The two arrival rows are our own estimates, worked out from the official 3-4 week figure, and Character.AI hasn’t promised either date. They do show why waiting costs something, because a request made on November 1 would land about when the auction and the sale hearing are scheduled. Whether a request that’s still pending when the sale closes would be honored is something we couldn’t find an answer to.

Character AI export data: steps on the website

These steps come from Character.AI’s help center, in an article updated around October 9.

1. Open your Profile.
2. Click Profile Settings.
3. Click Account.
4. Click Manage Account & Data.
5. Click Export Data. A pop-up tells you an email with a download link is on its way.

The email goes to the address on the account, and you’ll be waiting weeks for it, so check now that you can still open that inbox.

The help article gives the 3-4 week figure twice, so plan around it. An older help article gives the same website path and says nothing about timing, file format or expiry.

How do I save chats in Character AI on iPhone?

In the mobile app, the official export takes four taps. The help center writes these steps for the mobile app in general, and we haven’t tested them on an iPhone ourselves.

1. Open your Profile.
2. Tap the Settings icon.
3. Tap Legal & Privacy.
4. Tap Export Data. A Success banner appears once the request is submitted.

The older help article words that last step as Export my data, so if your menu reads a little differently, look for that wording in the settings menu. The newer article is the one we’ve followed.

Because the official export takes weeks, it’s worth saving a few things on the phone itself today. Tom’s Guide suggests saving important conversations, character descriptions and storylines by hand as an extra precaution, and one person on r/CharacterAI said they had screenshotted their personas and the bots they talk to. Copy the text of a conversation into the Notes app or any document app you already use, and take screenshots of the character page and your persona so you have the exact wording. We haven’t tried this inside a logged-in account, so check how the app lets you select a long run of messages before you commit to copying one conversation start to finish. Screenshots of the scenes that matter most are a reasonable second choice.

What arrives in the email, and what is in the file?

When the export is ready, an email with a download link goes to the account’s email address, and the link is valid for 7 days from the moment it’s sent.

The help article doesn’t say what the file contains. It doesn’t list chats, characters, personas, voice or images, and it names no file format, so we can’t tell you either. Tom’s Guide adds a caution that exported data may not keep the interactive experience or the behavior of your favorite characters, and that you may not be able to import it into another chatbot. The privacy policy mentions a copy in a portable or machine-readable format, but that describes a legal right and says nothing about what this particular file looks like.

In practice, open the file the day it arrives, check that the chats you care about are inside, and save a copy somewhere that belongs to you. If something is missing, fall back on the copies you made by hand, as described in the section on saving one chat yourself.

Character AI export data not working: what to check

We found no Character.AI troubleshooting article for exports that never arrive or fail, so what follows are ordinary checks based on what the help article does say. Reddit threads from October 14 show other people asking how to export and whether the app’s export works, including one person who said everybody claimed to have done it and nobody explained how.

1. Processing takes 3-4 weeks, so a week with no email is what the help article leads you to expect. A request made on October 15 isn’t expected before early November.
2. The link goes to the email address on the account. Look in spam there, and make sure it’s the address you think it is.
3. The website shows a pop-up after you click Export Data, and the app shows a Success banner. If you never saw either one, the request may not have gone through. You can send it again, though the help center doesn’t say whether a second request restarts the wait.
4. Keep the account until you’ve downloaded the file and looked inside, because deleting an account is permanent and can’t be reversed.
5. When the email comes, open it that day. The link lasts 7 days from when it’s sent, and the help article doesn’t say whether you can get a fresh one afterward.
6. If four weeks pass with nothing, the privacy policy gives a second route. It lists a right to a copy of your data in a portable or machine-readable format and gives two ways to ask: the request form at support.character.ai/hc/en-us/requests/new and the address privacy@character.ai. We don’t know whether that route is faster than the Export Data button, or whether that right applies wherever you live.

Beyond these, we have no sourced list of reasons an export fails.

Can you save one Character AI chat yourself?

Yes, and for a single conversation it’s a quick option. The official export is a request for your account’s data, and the help article describes no way to pick one chat out of it.

Copying the text into a document works on any device and gives you something you can search later. Screenshots cover the pages that are awkward to copy, such as a character’s profile. On a computer, your browser’s print dialog can usually save a page as a PDF. We haven’t tried that on a Character.AI chat, so open the PDF afterward and check that the whole conversation made it in.

There’s also a third-party browser extension called CAI Tools that adds import, export and chat saving to the Character.AI site, and SillyTavern’s documentation points to it for bringing Character.AI chats and bots into SillyTavern. We don’t recommend it, for these reasons.

• It’s made by an independent developer, and Character.AI doesn’t make it.
• It runs inside your logged-in Character.AI session, so it may be able to see what’s on the page. We haven’t checked which permissions it holds.
• Its Chrome Web Store listing shows a 3.4 out of 5 rating from 319 ratings, about 40,000 users, version 3.8.0, and a last update on October 4, 2026. The developer declares that it won’t collect or use your data, which is their own statement.
• The README in its source repository says the code there is out of date.
• We haven’t verified that it works on the current site, or whether using it fits Character.AI’s terms of service.

If you’re still weighing it, read the listing and the repository first.

What should I save for each character if I plan to move?

Whatever app you move to, you’ll probably want three things from each character, and a fourth if you set up a persona. Do your favorite characters first, since nobody can say yet what the official export will include.

Here’s a template you can paste into a note and fill in, one per character.

Character name:
Where I saved their page (screenshot or note title):

Opening message, word for word:

Description, word for word:

My persona (who I am in this story):

Conversation saved as (file or note title):
Date range of the chat:

Where the story stands
- What has happened so far, in a few sentences:
- How we talk to each other:
- Running jokes, nicknames, shared places:
- Things left unresolved:
- Last scene, and where we stopped:

What happens to my chats and personal data in the sale?

Part of this is settled and part is open.

Character.AI’s privacy policy, effective July 1, 2026, has a section on business transfers. It says information may be disclosed in connection with or during negotiations or closing of a merger, a sale of company assets, financing or an acquisition. That wording was in the policy before the bankruptcy.

The Disney license, as described in the court filing, covers technology and patents. It excludes end user data and databases, personally identifiable information of users, what users typed in, the outputs generated for them, consumer-facing applications, domain names, training data and finished models, and Disney takes on no liabilities. So user data sits outside the Disney piece. The company is seeking to sell all or substantially all of its assets, though, which means a different buyer could be offered more than Disney is. Whether any bidder will receive user data is unknown, and reporting on the company’s motions says they don’t state whether user data is part of an asset sale.

On October 14, New York Attorney General James and 39 other attorneys general, including D.C., filed a notice in the case. Among other requests, they asked that any buyer keep users able to access their data and give everyone the chance to delete it 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. The filing is a notice of interest and a reservation of rights, and the states say they may ask for a consumer privacy ombudsman. We found no court order on user data in what we read. Our page on whether Character.AI is safe covers the wider safety questions.

Deleting your account is permanent, and the help center says it can’t be reversed. On the website the path is Profile, Profile Settings, Account, Manage Account & Data, then Delete Account. In the app it’s Profile, the settings icon, then Remove Account. That article shows as updated two years ago, so the labels may have changed.

Creators should also know that the privacy policy says that if you’ve made a character available to others, the company reserves the right to keep it active even after you delete your data and account. If you decide to delete, do it after you’ve downloaded the export file and checked it. That order can run close to the sale dates, so if your main worry is your data reaching a buyer, keep an eye on the case: the attorneys general have asked that users get a chance to delete before any sale of their data, and we found no ruling on that yet.

Where do I go after Character AI? How to choose

It helps to ask what you were using Character.AI for. If you spent your time with many characters, wrote long roleplay or built characters of your own, you’ll want an app with a roster and tools for creating characters. If you had one character you came back to every day and the history with that character is what you’ll miss, you’ll want an app built around one ongoing relationship with long-term memory.

We don’t have reliable data on where Character.AI users are going. We didn’t read the replies in the Reddit threads about alternatives, so we can’t say which apps people recommend. One person on r/CharacterAIRefugees listed what they were looking for: long replies, a place to enter their character’s information, and an iOS app. Here are a few more questions to ask of any app you try.

• Can you bring your own character text, or does the app supply its characters?
• What does it remember, and for how long? If you’ve lost memories to an app update before, our guide on it explains what that loss looks like.
• Does it have an iPhone app, if that’s what you use?
• Can you export and delete your own data, and what does its privacy policy say about a sale of the company?

Our Character.AI alternatives page lays out the comparison in more detail.

Riho is built around one girlfriend, Riho. She remembers what you live through together, and the long-term memory page describes how that works day to day. She’s on iPhone, and the button on this page lets you meet her early. If your story depends on a character you built, Riho isn’t the place to continue it, since she’s the only girlfriend in the app.