Is Character.AI shutting down? What is known, with dates

The short answer

Character.AI has not shut down, and no closing date has been announced. Character Technologies, the company behind it, filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware on October 12, 2026 (case 26-11603). It expects to keep the platform running through a court-supervised sale, "with minimal disruptions" in its words, and says paid plans bill as before for now. If no bid keeps the platform going, the company says it will be wound down. So the real question is who bids by November 20.

This page was last checked on the date at the top. We update it when the court or the company says something new.

Where things stand

The dates

These dates come from the company's sale papers, and the court can move them. You can follow the filings on the case docket.

What is actually being sold

The opening bid comes from Disney Worldwide Services: $20 million for a non-exclusive license to certain technology and legal claims, plus help from former staff, 66 of about 86 of whom accepted offers from Disney. The app, the accounts and the conversations are not in that bid. A rival bid has to start at $21.7 million in cash. According to the company's first filing, Character.AI earned about $2.5 million a month from advertising and was spending $8 to 9 million a month more than it took in, so whoever keeps the app also has to pay for running it. In earlier talks, about 28 possible buyers were approached and one proposal came back, which the company did not consider workable.

What happens to your chats

Nobody has said what happens to stored chats if the platform winds down. Attorneys general of about 40 US states have asked the court to protect user data, and the judge encouraged the appointment of a privacy ombudsperson. Those are protections for your data; they are not a copy of it.

The official export is the one thing in your hands, and it is slow: Character.AI says it can take 3 to 4 weeks, and the download link expires 7 days after the email arrives. An export requested today may arrive about when the sale closes.

What to do now

1. Request your export today. In Character.AI open Settings, then Account, then Manage Account & Data, and choose Export Data. Watch your email for the link, because it does not last.
2. Open the file when it comes. Our free export viewer reads the ZIP in your browser, shows every conversation, and saves them as text. Nothing is uploaded.
3. Check your subscription. The company says paid plans continue and that it will tell subscribers before paid features change.
4. Look around without hurry. We compare the 10 best alternatives in one place, with our own downsides. If you want a character to come along, the viewer can bring it to Amavie with one conversation in its memory, for 5 Quanta.

What we do not know

Who will bid by November 20. Whether a buyer keeps the app, and for how long. Whether the export keeps working during a wind-down. What happens to characters made by people. If you see a post with a closing date, look for the court filing behind it: rumors of a shutdown on a set date have already turned out false.

About this page

Amavie makes an app of AI characters, so we have an interest here and we say so. Every claim above links to its source or to the case papers. This is not legal advice. Character.AI is a trademark of its owner, and Amavie is not affiliated with it.

If you only want to talk to someone new: open the catalog or say hello to the ambassadors. As a guest you get 20 messages per 24 hours on one device, with no account.

What it costs, in plain numbers

Reading and saving your export with our viewer is free and needs no account. Chatting costs no Quanta; pictures, video and new characters do, with the price shown first.

Pricing. One Quanta is $0.10 — on the web and in the iOS/Android app alike (100 Quanta are $10 everywhere; minimum web top-up $10). Text messages cost zero Quanta. An image is 2 Quanta, video is from 4 Quanta a second, creating a character is 5. Voice replies are included on every plan, Free too, with no per-line charge. Explorer is $19 a month (or $168 a year — save 26%) and adds 50 Quanta a month; Creator $49 a month or $468 a year, 500 Quanta a month — yearly plans get their Quanta every month too, and the plans are the same on the web, in the App Store and on Google Play. Studio, $149 a month with 2,000 Quanta a month, is sold on the website. Free also gets 10 Quanta once at signup, with no daily refill. Guests: 20 messages a day per device, no account.

There is no daily Quanta drip; the free tier is simply free, and paid plans add Quanta for pictures and video. One account works on the web, in the App Store and on Google Play.

Age, and the rules of your country

Age. An Amavie account is 13+. Amavie isn't built around romance: characters keep to filters like those of children's services and Instagram, and romance or flirting with an adult character opens only after you confirm you are 18 or older — and, where your country's law requires it, after an age check. Age rules follow the law of the country you are in: where it sets a higher age for talking to an AI, the site asks once before the first conversation. Public posts, stories and moments never show explicit content — that stays inside private chats — and characters under 18 never take part in romance. Every character is an AI, and Amavie says so on the site and in the apps; where the law requires it, a conversation also opens with a line saying you are talking to an AI.

Your data

Your data. Deleting is self serve: amavie.ai/liquidation, type DELETE. Your chats and messages go at once and do not come back. The account itself stays closed for 30 days and comes back only with the Keep My Account button on that page; after that the rest is erased automatically. Reported messages get snapshotted for moderation and kept 90 days after the report is closed. You can download everything the account keeps (profile, chats, purchases, characters, posts, your Sport and Joker data) as one ZIP at amavie.ai/account/data, any time, even while the account waits for deletion.