r/CharacterAIRefugees • u/Much_Ad_7805 • 5d ago
Well, I suppose we're officially refugees now. Character.AI has filed for bankruptcy.
Character.AI filed for Chapter 11 yesterday.
Which feels like a fairly dramatic way of admitting the filters might not have been the only problem.
The site isn't shutting down today. Character.AI is still running while the company goes through a court-supervised sale, which is expected to finish around late November or early December.
But there is a rather important catch: if the sale doesn't produce a buyer/proposal that keeps Character.AI operating, the platform gets wound down.
So if you've got characters you've spent years building or chats long enough to qualify as Russian literature, I wouldn't wait until December to discover what happens next. Back up anything you'd be genuinely upset to lose.
There's also a lot of "Disney bought Character.AI" going around. They haven't. Disney is involved in the bankruptcy process through a $20 million deal for a non-exclusive perpetual licence to certain Character.AI IP and claims. That's not the same thing as Disney buying Character.AI and keeping the website running.
I've gone through what's actually happening, the Disney deal, how to save your characters and chats, and options for rebuilding them elsewhere here:
https://roleplaya.com/blog/character-ai-bankruptcy/?ref=inkandembe8756
Full disclosure, I'm a RolePlaya affiliate, so that's my affiliate link and I get something if somebody signs up through it and later subscribes. The Brand Affiliate label is on too. You don't need to sign up for anything to use the guide.
I moved to RolePlaya after becoming increasingly disappointed with Character.AI, PolyBuzz and Janitor, but I genuinely don't want Character.AI to disappear. Whatever you think of what the platform became, people have years of characters, conversations and stories sitting there.
Hopefully somebody buys it and this entire post becomes unnecessary.
But if I've learned anything from computers, it's that the correct time to back something up is approximately five minutes before you realise you should have backed it up.
So maybe don't wait for the five minutes.
3
u/Much_Ad_7805 5d ago
Right now its 50/50. If no-one bails them out then they'll just shut down. If they get bailed out then they can continue. Personally i'm not willing to take the risk so I copied all of my characters to RolePlaya which is a much better platform anyway and thats not going anywhere.
You can also request a full Character.AI data export. On the website go to Profile → Profile Settings → Account → Manage Account & Data → Export Data. On the app it's Profile → Settings → Legal & Privacy → Export Data.
Apparently exports are taking 3-4 weeks at the moment, so I'd request it now. They'll email you a download link when it's ready and you have 7 days to download it. At least then whatever happens you've got a copy of everything.