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Disney Wants to Hire Most of the Employees From Bankrupt Character.AI

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Disney Wants to Hire Most of the Employees From Bankrupt Character.AI

The lawsuit-riddled controversial AI chatbot company Character.AI officially filed for bankruptcy earlier this week. Now, reports say Disney is looking to buy up most of the AI startup’s workforce.

Disney and Character.AI have had a rocky past. Roughly a year ago, the entertainment giant sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist letter, accusing the AI company of allowing its users to create unauthorized chatbots based on beloved Disney characters. The dispute ended without a lawsuit when Character.AI removed the characters from its platform.

Flash forward to last month, when Disney announced it had hired Character.AI’s CEO Karandeep Anand to serve as the company’s first-ever chief technology officer. Other employees from the AI company’s technical team were also expected to join Anand over at Disney, the now-bankrupt Character.AI said in a press release at the time, all to “help connect fans worldwide with [Disney’s] beloved stories and characters in new and innovative ways.” Now, legal filings show that Disney is looking to hire 66 Character.AI employees, a whopping majority of the company’s workforce, and is willing to pay $60 million per year over three years for them, or a total of $180 million.

Disney’s interest in Character.AI is a pretty major indication that viewers could expect a push into AI storytelling in the near future. Disney has also bid $20 million to acquire an undisclosed portion of Character.AI’s assets.

AI is known for its platform where users can converse with AI chatbots modeled after their favorite fictional characters, giving fans the feeling of becoming part of the fictional worlds of their favorite shows, movies, or books.


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