Disney acquires Character.AI while avoiding lawsuits
The gist
Disney paid Character.AI $5.5 million, hired most of its staff and offered $20 million for its IP.
The bankruptcy route lets Disney take the tech while leaving the chatbot lawsuits behind.
How it unfolded
- Nov 2021Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas left Google and founded Character.AI.
- Sep 2022The Character.AI product opened to public beta testing.
- 2024Google paid $2.7 billion to license Character.AI's large model technology and brought the two founders and some core researchers back to Google.