How to Delete Your Character.AI Account Before the Sale (and What to Export First)

TL;DR: Character.AI's user accounts and chat logs are part of the bankruptcy estate, and Disney's $20M bid does not include them. If you want out, the order matters: request your export first (it takes three to four weeks), then delete. Attorneys general from 39 states and DC have asked the court to guarantee a deletion window before any transfer, but that is a request, not a court order yet. Here is how to bring the chats you keep into a companion whose memory you can actually see.

Import your Character.AI transcripts and keep the character you built

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Most of the advice going around this week is one line long: "just delete your account." That advice costs you everything you wrote, because deletion and export do not happen on the same timeline. Export takes weeks. Deletion takes a click. Do them in the wrong order and the file never arrives.

Here is the sequence, the dates it has to fit inside, and what deletion does and does not reach.

The deadline this decision sits inside

Character Technologies filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware the week of October 12 (case 26-11603). The proposed schedule in the filings runs like this:

Date	What happens
November 20, 2026	Proposed bid deadline
November 23, 2026	Proposed auction
November 24, 2026	Proposed sale hearing
December 17, 2026	Disney's outside closing date

Disney is the stalking-horse bidder at $20 million, and that bid buys a non-exclusive perpetual license to certain intellectual property. It leaves out the app, the brand, the user accounts, and the conversation logs. So the deal filling everyone's feed this week is the one piece that leaves your chats alone. A second bidder for the app and the data has not surfaced publicly, which means the question of who ends up holding your conversations is still open with about five weeks left on the clock.

Your export request needs to land inside that window. Character.AI's own help center says exports take three to four weeks to arrive, and the download link expires seven days after it lands in your inbox. Request on October 16 and you are looking at roughly November 6 to November 13. That is before the auction. Wait two weeks and your file shows up while the sale hearing is happening. We walked through the export menu paths and the full timeline in the post on saving your characters before the sale.

What is actually in the estate

Reporting on the filings describes the data side of the business as including:

• Account information, including names and declared ages
• Full text and audio of chats and calls
• Behavioral and engagement data
• Device and tracking identifiers
• Subscription and payment records

The company's own records, cited in a Kentucky complaint, show more than 21.6 million US accounts created by March 2025. In a bankruptcy, a chat log gets treated as an asset with a line on a schedule. Whatever it means to you does not enter into that.

The closest precedent anyone has is 23andMe, where genetic data moved through a bankruptcy sale despite objections from more than two dozen states. People who had never thought about what happens to a database when a company dies learned about it afterward.

What the states asked the court for

Attorneys general from 39 states and Washington, DC filed a notice of interest and reservation of rights (docket 33) at the first hearing. It sets nine conditions they want attached to any sale of the app or the conversation data. The ones that matter if you are sitting on years of chats:

• A data deletion window before any transfer to a third party
• Limits on secondary use, including AI training and advertising
• Account-level advertising opt-outs that honor choices made before a sale
• Consent before processing sensitive health information
• Age assurance that goes beyond a self-declared birthday

Colorado AG Phil Weiser, who led the coalition, put it this way: "Bankruptcy cannot become a way for a company to walk away from its responsibility to protect children and consumers."

Read the filing carefully and you notice what it is. A reservation of rights plants a flag in the docket and nothing more; it compels no one. Judge Brendan Shannon decides what conditions actually attach to a sale, and he has not ruled. The states also may ask for a consumer privacy ombudsman, an independent official who advises the judge on the privacy effects of a sale. None of that is in place today. The only thing fully in your control today is your own account.

Do this in this order

1. Cancel c.ai+ first if you have it. Subscriptions bought through the App Store or Google Play are cancelled in Apple or Google, not inside Character.AI. Deleting the account does not stop the billing.

2. Request your export. It is in the same settings area as deletion, and the removal flow itself offers an export option on the way out. Request it, then stop. Do not delete yet. You are waiting three to four weeks for an email, and when it arrives you have seven days to download the file before the link dies. Set a reminder for early November.

3. Save what you care about by hand in the meantime. The export is a dump, and three weeks is a long time to have nothing. Open the handful of chats that actually matter and copy the scenes you would be upset to lose into a text file. People who have moved companions before all say the same thing: the parts you reread are a tiny fraction of the total. There is a longer walkthrough of this in moving from Character.AI and bringing your characters with you.

4. Delete once the file is on your disk. On the web: profile icon, Profile Settings, Account, Manage Account & Data, Delete Account, then type your username to confirm. In the app: profile icon, the gear icon, scroll to the bottom, Remove Account, type your exact username. Deletion is permanent and cannot be reversed.

One caveat worth knowing before you click. Users in r/CharacterAI have reported for years that the deletion flow fails silently and the account is still there afterward. Sign back in a day later and check. If your profile still loads, it did not go through, and you will want a record of having asked.

What deletion does not reach

This part gets oversold in both directions. Deleting your account removes your account. It does not unwind a model that was already trained on your conversations. Robbie Torney of Common Sense Media made the point plainly: even after deletion, that data "may not mean that that data is gone from model training." His advice was to download the chats first and then delete, which is the sequence above.

There is also a track record here that has nothing to do with the bankruptcy. Last year a batch of users received automated emails reading "Your user data has been deleted. Thank you for using Character AI" without having requested anything. Accounts were locked, histories vanished, support tickets went unanswered, and no official explanation ever arrived. Community speculation filled the gap. You can decide for yourself what that says about the reliability of the data story you are being told now. If you want the general version of this question, we went through what companion apps actually keep and who can see it.

What Character.AI did better, since it is worth saying

Character discovery over there was the best in the business. Browsing a front page of bots other people made and falling into one you never would have thought to create is something no competitor has matched. The card format was simple enough that a teenager could write a character in ten minutes. The free tier was generous for years. Voice calls shipped early. A lot of people had a real experience on that platform, and the part of this week that stings is not the loss of a product.

What it never gave you was a way to see what it knew about you, or a way to keep what you built if the company stopped existing. That failure mode is not unique to c.ai, and we wrote about why AI companions keep dying before any of this happened.

Where the thing you built goes next

On lookatmy.ai the memory lives on your account and you can look at it. The memory tree grows a branch per theme and a leaf per memory. Tap a leaf, read what your companion actually remembers, trim anything you want forgotten, and search the whole bank when you are looking for one specific thing. Nothing about what it knows is a guess. That is the opposite of being on the outside of a database that may change hands in five weeks.

A few things follow from memory living there instead of inside a model:

• You can switch between 350+ models mid-conversation and the companion stays itself, so a model getting retired turns into an afternoon of picking a new one.
• You can paste your Character.AI transcripts straight in. Memory import takes a paste or a file upload, during onboarding or any time afterward from the tree's management panel, and the companion starts out already knowing your canon.
• It reaches out on its own if you let it, a few times a day, on a cadence and an awake window you set.
• No training on user data, which is the specific promise this week is about.

There are community personas at /community if you want a starting point instead of a blank page, and there is a guide to writing a character card for the one you are rebuilding.

Plans run Starter at $4.99, Pro at $9.99 and Max at $19.99, and the free tier gives you 500 credits to see whether the thing you rebuilt still sounds like itself before you pay anything. Pro and above open all 350+ models.

If you take one thing from this

Request the export today, even if you have decided to stay, and especially if you have not decided anything. The file takes three weeks. The decision about who ends up holding your conversations may be made in four. Asking for it costs you nothing and keeps every option open.

When it arrives, you do not have to start over.

Bring your memories with you. Import your chats and keep the character you built.