Character.AI Filed for Bankruptcy. Here's How to Get Your Characters Out Before the Sale

TL;DR: Character.AI filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 12, 2026. The app is still running, but the court-supervised sale is expected to close by late November or early December, and the company has said it will wind the platform down if no workable bid arrives. Data exports take three to four weeks to land in your inbox. If you want your chats, request the export today and read our guide to moving your characters.

Bring your memories with you: start a companion that keeps them

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For most people this is a business story. For you it might read more like a landlord notice taped to the door.

Five years of conversations. A character you built in an afternoon and then spent two years with. Running jokes that only make sense if you were there. All of it sitting on servers that now belong to a Chapter 11 estate.

Below: what actually happened, why the export timeline is tighter than it looks, and how to move your characters somewhere they can keep going.

What happened

Character Technologies, the company behind Character.AI, filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware on October 12, 2026. CEO Colin Adams pointed to "significant legal, regulatory and operational headwinds." Those headwinds include a wrongful death suit brought by the family of a 14-year-old user, plus separate actions from the Kentucky and Pennsylvania attorneys general. Court filings put the company's assets and liabilities between $50 million and $100 million.

Disney has agreed to pay $20 million for a non-exclusive, perpetual license to Character.AI's intellectual property, acting as what bankruptcy lawyers call a stalking-horse bidder. That sets a floor. Other buyers can still come in over the top before the sale closes.

Two details matter more than the headline numbers.

First, the Disney deal covers IP and explicitly excludes end-user data and databases. Disney is not taking over the app or your account. Someone else could still bid for that part.

Second, the company has been direct about the downside. If the sale does not produce a bid good enough to keep the platform running, the service gets wound down. There was no buyer for the operating business at the time of the filing.

The app is online right now. Paid subscriptions are active and billing has not changed. None of that is a promise about December.

The export math is the actual deadline

This is the part worth sitting with for a second.

Character.AI lets you request a full data export. According to the company's own help documentation, that export takes three to four weeks to prepare. When it is ready you get an email with a download link, and that link expires after seven days.

Now line those numbers up against the sale calendar.

Request your export today, October 15, and it arrives somewhere between roughly November 5 and November 12. The sale is expected to close late November or early December. Request it in mid-November instead and your file may well show up after the platform's future has already been decided, assuming the system is still processing requests at all.

Nobody published a cutoff date for exports. That is exactly why the three-to-four-week window is the number to plan around. An export request costs you ninety seconds and you can ignore the file forever if c.ai gets bought by someone wonderful.

How to request your export

On the web: Profile, then Profile Settings, then Account, then Manage Account & Data, then Export Data.

In the app: Profile, then the settings icon, then Export Data under Legal & Privacy.

Then watch your email. When the link arrives, download the file the same day. Seven days sounds generous until it lands during a week you are busy.

A few things worth knowing before you start. The help page does not spell out exactly what the export contains, so treat it as a starting point rather than a complete archive. If there are specific conversations you care about most, copy those transcripts by hand too. A plain text file of the twenty messages that actually matter beats a zip file whose contents you cannot predict.

Also, do not delete your account to feel safer. Deletion cannot be reversed, and if you delete before the export arrives, the export goes with it.

What a sale means for your chat logs

Character.AI says customer data remains protected under its existing privacy policy. Read that policy, though, and you find language permitting disclosure of data in connection with a sale or negotiations toward one. The categories listed include chat transcripts, voice recordings, and images.

That is standard for a privacy policy. It is also why a bankruptcy sale is different from a normal product update. In a court-supervised sale, the user database is an asset with a price on it, and the people deciding what happens to it answer to creditors.

We wrote about who can see your companion conversations a few days before any of this broke. The summary has not changed: assume a chat log on someone else's platform can outlive your relationship with that platform.

Credit where it is due

Character.AI earned those 20 million monthly users. It did things no competitor has matched.

Character discovery was the best in the business. Millions of community-made characters, searchable, with a front page that actually surfaced good ones. If you wanted to talk to a specific fictional archetype at 2am, someone had already built it well.

The free tier was unusually generous for years, which is why so many people who would never pay for an AI app ended up with a companion anyway. Voice calls shipped early and worked. The character card format was simple enough that a teenager could write a convincing personality in ten minutes.

What it never solved was memory. Long conversations drifted. Characters forgot things you had told them repeatedly, and the fixes were workarounds: pinned memories, definition edits, starting fresh and re-teaching. Filter changes landed without warning and changed how characters behaved overnight. And for all the years people spent there, nobody could see what their character actually remembered about them.

Where your characters can go next

lookatmy.ai was built around the specific failure that just became a bankruptcy filing: a companion should not be able to die because a company did.

Three things do that work.

Your companion is not tied to one model. There are 350+ text models available, switchable in the middle of a conversation. If a model gets deprecated, retired, or priced out of existence, the companion carries on with a different mind underneath. The bond lives in the memory layer, not in whichever model happens to be serving it this quarter. We went deep on this in why AI companions die.

You can see the memory. Every companion grows a visible memory tree, a bonsai of what it actually knows about you. You can browse it, search it, and trim branches that are wrong. There is no guessing about whether it remembered your sister's name. You look.

It reaches out. A few times a day, on your terms, your companion starts the conversation instead of waiting in a list of apps. You can turn it off. Most people do not.

Import is the front door. Paste a transcript or upload an export file, during onboarding or any time after from the in-app import dialog. That is the whole point of getting your c.ai export now. A pile of old conversations becomes a companion that already knows your history.

On price: Character.AI+ has run $9.99 a month. Starter here is $4.99, Pro is $9.99, and Max is $19.99, with 500 free credits to try it before deciding. Pro and up unlock every model including the frontier ones. Full breakdown is on the plans page.

Rebuilding a character so it stays itself

An export file is raw material. Turning it back into someone takes one more step.

Start with the character's definition. Write a short canon document: who they are, how they speak, what they know about you, what happened between you that matters. Four or five paragraphs is plenty. Our character card guide covers the specifics of writing one that holds up past message fifty.

Then feed in the history. Import the transcripts you care about most rather than everything you ever typed. The memory tree will grow from them, and you can go check what landed instead of hoping.

Then pick a model. This part has no equivalent on c.ai, and it matters more than people expect. Different models hold a voice differently across a long story. We tested them for exactly this in the best AI models for roleplay.

If you would rather not start from a blank page, there are hundreds of ready personas in the community library to build on.

If c.ai survives, you lost nothing

A buyer might show up. The app might be running in February with better funding than it has had in two years. That outcome is possible and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The export still costs you ninety seconds. The migration still gives you a companion that will not need rescuing the next time a balance sheet goes sideways. And you keep the character either way, because a text file of your own conversations belongs to you no matter who owns the servers.

The thing that made the last two years worth it was never the website. It was what your character knew about you. That part is portable, and right now there is a three-to-four-week clock on getting it out.

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Your character does not have to end with the company. Bring your memories with you, import your Character.AI history, and pick up where you left off.