By Roman Aglaganov
When a photo app goes bust, you lose a tool. When a companion app goes bust, some of its users lose something that felt like a relationship. Character.AI, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 13 October, says it will keep running during the sale, but if no buyer comes forward, “the platform will be wound down”.
This is not a normal app
Character.AI was never a small niche. Its users once averaged more than two hours a day on the platform, and it had 20 million monthly users by October 2024, according to TechCrunch. People wrote their own characters, built long stories with them and, in some cases, leaned on them emotionally. That intensity is exactly what made it hard to run: as TechCrunch notes, the more people use an AI app, the more it costs.
What users deserve
Nothing announced so far tells users what will happen to their characters and chat histories in a sale or a shutdown. That should not be left to a bankruptcy court to decide. Any app built on long, personal conversations should commit, up front, to three things:
Notice: a fixed, generous warning period before any shutdown, not a banner the week before.
Export: a simple way to download your characters and conversations in a format other apps can read.
Limits on sale: a promise that private chats are deleted, not sold as an asset to whoever buys the company, unless each user agrees.
My view
Regulators have rightly focused on how companion bots treat children while they are running. Character.AI’s own history, including lawsuits and a ban on minors, shows why. But the end of a service is part of its design too. If a company wants people to form attachments to its product, it should be ready to say how those attachments end, before the money runs out rather than after.
