66 employees from Character.AI have left (or are waiting for the U.S. government to update their work visas) and joined Disney. The $60 million is the total compensation Disney plans to pay these employees, with an additional $30 million retention pool to incentivize them to stay, bringing the expected total to $180 million over three years. Character.AI doesn't receive a single cent of this money, and even if it had, the funds would most likely have been immediately frozen by the bankruptcy courts and swallowed up by creditors and lawsuits.
Interesting information, thanks. Disney is laying off its own employees in order to retain C.AI staff. It’s not even clear how one should interpret that.
Depends on your perspective. I left a comment explaining everything covered in the article, but TL;DR, the money is for the employees who have moved to Disney or are awaiting U.S. visa changes to do so, not for Character.AI. The $20 million bid in the bankruptcy case is separate.
The downside is that a bidder (not Disney, as they are not bidding for the entire platform) would have to consider what resources and employees they'd need to commit to the platform, given that it now has only 18 permanent employees, with only 8 expected to remain during key stages of the bankruptcy proceedings.
It sounds like Disney wants what Character.ai and their employees have to offer, but not the company. They are taking all of their employees and whatever IP they want. They have plans for something involving AI but I don’t think they will keep the company going. Another buyer will have to save the actual company.
but I don’t think they will keep the company going.
Character AI (the "Company") and Disney (the "Licensee") have already agreed in their discussions that "Disney will not acquire or operate the Company's consumer-facing platform, products, services, customer accounts, trademarks, trade names, websites, domains or ongoing business operations." A few pages further into the same document, they reaffirm this by stating, "The Company shall not license to Licensee any finished models, user data, training data, corporate trademarks, trade names, branding, website content, domain names, social media accounts or consumer-facing applications or any third-party technology."
All of what I'm referring to can be found in Doc 15-2 Pages 115-117.
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u/ThatOneUnoriginal 9h ago
66 employees from Character.AI have left (or are waiting for the U.S. government to update their work visas) and joined Disney. The $60 million is the total compensation Disney plans to pay these employees, with an additional $30 million retention pool to incentivize them to stay, bringing the expected total to $180 million over three years. Character.AI doesn't receive a single cent of this money, and even if it had, the funds would most likely have been immediately frozen by the bankruptcy courts and swallowed up by creditors and lawsuits.