Disney will offer jobs to most of the workforce of Character.AI, the chatbot startup that filed for bankruptcy last week, according to a legal filing spotted by Bloomberg and reported by TechCrunch on October 18. Disney has agreed to make employment offers to at least 60 Character.AI employees — the majority of the staff — paying them an estimated $60 million in annual compensation.
The filing says the “vast majority” of the employees who were offered jobs at Disney have already accepted them. It is the fullest picture yet of how the entertainment giant is absorbing the people, if not the company, behind one of the best-known consumer chatbot platforms.
What The Filing Says About The Hiring Deal
AI Weekly’s summary of the Bloomberg-reported term sheet puts the migrating group at roughly 66 employees, out of about 86 full-time staff Character.AI had on September 30. It reports Disney has budgeted about $180 million over three years to compensate them, with a further $30 million set aside as an aggregate retention pool — a talent bill that dwarfs the technology bid beside it.
According to that summary, 56 of the 66 had formally resigned, while 10 were waiting on US work-authorisation updates — H-1B, TN or F-1 visas — before they could leave. At the top of the group is Karandeep Anand, Character.AI’s former chief executive, whom Disney named its first-ever company-wide chief technology officer effective October 2, reporting to CEO Josh D’Amaro.
The $20 Million License Bid Behind The Hires
The hiring sits alongside Disney’s separate $20 million stalking-horse bid, made through Disney Worldwide Services, for a non-exclusive, perpetual license to certain Character.AI intellectual property and company claims. AI Weekly’s reading of the filing says that money buys the code behind the chatbot’s training, safety and serving systems plus nine patents — while the app, the brand, the user data, the chats and the finished models stay in the bankruptcy estate for other bidders.
A stalking-horse bid sets the floor, not the outcome: the agreement remains subject to higher or better offers under the court-supervised sale, and competing bids could still change who ends up with the technology. Character.AI has said it expects the sale process to wrap up in late November or early December 2026, and that the platform will be wound down if no actionable proposal to keep it operating emerges.
Why Character.AI Ended Up In Bankruptcy Court
Character Technologies filed its voluntary Chapter 11 petition in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware on October 12, listing estimated assets and liabilities of $50 million to $100 million each. The filing says that despite a “large and engaged user base,” the company was hobbled by high costs and “potential litigation-related liabilities and regulatory engagement,” in TechCrunch’s quoting of the papers.
The liabilities are concrete. Character.AI was sued by the mother of a 14-year-old boy who said her son became obsessed with one of its chatbots before taking his own life, and it faces government investigations over child safety concerns. The same company Disney is now hiring from had received a Disney cease-and-desist letter in September 2025 over unauthorised use of its characters — roughly a year before Disney hired its chief executive.
Why It Matters
Character.AI is the clearest case yet of how a consumer AI company can hold users and lose the business: the asset buyers want is not the app, the brand or the chat data, but the engineers and the training, safety and serving code — valued here at $20 million for the license against roughly $180 million in three-year pay for the people. For the wider field of AI models built as companion products, the split is the lesson: the estate keeps everything users touched, while the value walks out with the team, which is why anyone learning how to read an AI model launch should now also ask who owns the staff behind it.
Background
Character.AI was founded in 2021 by former Google engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, and became a defining product of the chatbot boom, letting users create and talk to custom AI characters. Google struck a non-exclusive licensing deal in 2024 and rehired both founders into DeepMind, leaving the company to run under new leadership — first Karandeep Anand, now Colin Adams — while lawsuits, regulatory pressure and serving costs mounted over the past year.
Source: TechCrunch; AI Weekly, summarising the Bloomberg-reported bankruptcy filing
0 Comments