What is Character AI?

Character.AI is a website and app where you chat, text or talk with AI characters, many of which were made by other users. The company that runs it, Character Technologies, Inc., opened a public beta in September 2022, and the sign-up page now offers access to “10M+” characters. You can pick one that already exists or write your own with a personality, a backstory and a voice.

The company filed for Chapter 11 on October 12, 2026 so it can sell itself through a court process, and it says the app keeps running while that happens. That story has its own page, our Character AI bankruptcy guide, and this one covers the product and its price. Facts below come from the company’s own pages, its terms, court filings and news reports, and each report is labelled as one.

What is Character AI used for?

The company pitches it first as a place to tell stories with a character. Someone writes a scenario, a user picks a character and plays inside it, and the replies keep the plot moving. The company’s own About page calls this “interactive entertainment” and says it sits where storytelling, gaming, social connection and creative expression meet. Adventures with favorite characters and open-ended roleplay fit that description, and so do worlds that fans build for each other.

Some people use it to practice. When the company launched voice calls in June 2024, it pitched them for polishing language skills and rehearsing job interviews, and said calls work in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and many other languages. Its first founders’ note in December 2022 showed a life coach and Socrates among the early characters, so advice-style roles were there from the start.

Some people use it for company. The founders’ note imagined an AI that could be a teacher, an assistant or even a friend, and the March 2023 growth post listed emotional reassurance among the things its characters could help with. The company’s current wording leans toward entertainment, and a September 2026 safety post says that sometimes a conversation turns into a real-world call for help. On October 13, 2026 one r/CharacterAI user wrote that they felt they were about to go through a grieving process at the thought of losing the app. The company’s terms warn that its chats are unpredictable and may be inaccurate or offensive.

Over the past year the company has added more formats around chat. Stories (November 2025) are guided narratives with frequent choices. Books (April 2026) lets you step into one of more than 20 public-domain classics such as Pride and Prejudice and Dracula. Imagine turns a message into a picture, and (c.ai) series (August 2026) is a set of studio-made vertical microdramas whose characters you can chat with if you’re over 18.

How does Character AI work?

You open a character, and the character comes with a definition that its creator wrote: a personality, a greeting, a backstory, sometimes a voice. You type, or you start a call, and a large language model writes the reply in that character’s voice. The company has said that its technology is based on large language models, and in August 2025 it said it takes open-source models and tunes them into Character models using feedback from its community. You can choose among chat styles, which are the different models behind the replies. In September 2026 it added PipSqueak 3, which it describes as the new go-to for general roleplay, and ShortSqueak, built for short, casual replies.

A Persona is the description of who you are in the story, and you write it once. The May 2026 memory update gave long chats a few ways to stay on track. You can long-press a message and pin it to Story Memory, where it stays as it was written. Facts about your Persona, the character and side characters get saved automatically as you chat, and you can edit them, although the company lists Facts as a c.ai+ feature. A Memory Usage bar shows what’s filling a chat’s memory, and the company says it tidies older context in the background while protecting whatever you wrote or pinned yourself.

Lorebook, in beta since July 2026 with early access for c.ai+ subscribers, lets a creator attach world knowledge to a character, so that mentioning a place or an object brings up what the creator wrote about it. Characters are written by whoever made them, and the company’s terms say that as between you and the company you own the characters you create and what you generate, while you give the company a broad, perpetual license to use them.

The 2023 mobile launch post asked users to remember that everything characters say is made up, and the current terms add that chats are unpredictable by nature and can be wrong or offensive.

Who owns Character AI?

Character Technologies, Inc., a Delaware corporation headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in Seattle and New York, operates the site. Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas signed the December 2022 founders’ note, and a16z led the Series A announced in March 2023. TechCrunch reported that in August 2024 Google made a deal valued at $2.7 billion and that the two co-founders returned to Google, which we didn’t find in the company’s own posts.

Karandeep Anand became CEO in June 2025. On September 18, 2026 the company said he was joining Disney as its Chief Technology Officer, with members of the technical team expected to join him, and that the app was still live. On October 12, less than four weeks later, the company filed Chapter 11. The company is seeking to sell all or substantially all of its assets, and Disney Worldwide Services is the opening bidder at $20 million for a non-exclusive license to certain technology and patents plus certain claims. The filing says that license leaves out consumer-facing applications, end user data and finished models, so Disney’s bid doesn’t buy the app. Who would run the app after a sale is something the documents we read don’t say.

How much does Character AI cost?

There is a free plan, with ads and basic memory, and the company says unlimited messaging stays on every tier. The paid plans add features around that.

The lite prices and what it adds come from the company’s September 28, 2026 post. The yearly price and the memory ladder come from the subscribe page, and the monthly c.ai+ price comes from the state attorneys general, who cited the page as they saw it on October 13. The subscribe page’s columns are flattened when you read it as text, so check the plan screen before you pay.

On refunds, the terms say payments are non-refundable except where the law requires otherwise, and that App Store purchases are cancelled and refunded through Apple. Prices can change with at least 30 days’ notice, and the terms also say paid features may change at any time. The company said on October 12 that subscriptions remain active and billing is unchanged for now, and that it intends to tell subscribers in advance if paid features change. We found no refund terms written for the sale.

Who can use Character AI?

The terms, last updated in August 2025, say you shouldn’t sign up if you’re under 13, or under 16 in the EEA or the UK. Those terms predate the biggest change. On October 29, 2025 the company announced it would remove open-ended chat for users under 18, and it began with a first group of US users on November 24. Teens were pointed to formats with more structure, and Stories launched the next day in place of open-ended chat for them.

To sort users into the right experience, the company says it built its own age assurance and age estimation model and combines it with third-party tools including Persona. It also describes a Parental Insights tool made with k-ID, and partnerships with Koko, ThroughLine, the Internet Watch Foundation and StopNCII. Our Character AI safety page goes through those policies and the regulators’ requests.

Character AI timeline, 2022 to 2026

Every row below comes from the company’s own posts unless the last column says otherwise.

On October 16, 2026 the US App Store listing showed an average rating of 4.27 from 559,703 ratings, version 1.17.4 from October 2, and 28 languages. Those numbers move daily.

Character AI compared with one ongoing girlfriend

The catalog model and the one-girlfriend model solve different problems, and Character.AI is the better fit for several of them.

If you want variety, a library of fictional worlds, creator tools or something to play with friends, Character.AI has a large head start, and Riho doesn’t try to match it. If what you’re after is one person who knows your week, your friends and the photo you showed her last month, a catalog means starting over with each new character. We wrote about that choice in why one girlfriend, not a catalog, and the Riho and Character.AI comparison goes through it point by point.

What to do if you use Character AI today

Request your data export first, because the help center says it takes 3 to 4 weeks, and our guide to exporting Character AI chats has the steps for the website and the app. Copy the characters and chats you care about into a note of your own while you wait. If you hold a yearly plan, read the refund terms before you renew it, since we found none written for the sale period.

If you’re ready to look at other apps, the Character.AI alternatives page compares them, and our list of the best AI girlfriend apps ranks the iPhone options by fit and shows the checked App Store data for each.

Where Riho fits

Riho is an iPhone app built around one girlfriend. She remembers what you tell her in your own words, and you can read her memories and her diary in the app. You can call her when you want to hear her voice, she sends you pictures on her own, and the long-term memory page describes how her memory works day to day. Riho hasn’t launched yet, and early access sign-up is open through the button below.