Character.ai

Character.ai builds an AI entertainment platform where users create conversational Characters, explore stories and collaborate on fictional worlds. Its creator community builds characters for entertainment, learning and creative expression, while users can discover and converse with characters made by others. Lorebook, introduced in beta in 2026, lets creators attach world history, locations and backstories to Characters so that relevant knowledge can carry across chats.

Founded by Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, Character.ai launched its public beta in 2022. Karandeep Anand became CEO in 2025. Its research includes Kaiju, a family of language models designed for engaging conversation and efficient serving. Kaiju uses shared attention caches to reduce inference memory requirements and quantization-aware training to work with lower-precision numbers. The company documented this engineering as it shifted toward building on open-source models in 2025.

Character.ai combines advertising-supported free access with c.ai+ subscriptions. In April 2026, the company reported serving millions of users monthly and having no outside investors. Its relationship with Google includes a completed 2024 transaction granting Google a nonexclusive license to its then-current language-model technology, alongside hiring certain employees. Alphabet paid $2.7 billion in cash and canceled convertible instruments; the transaction was not an acquisition of the entire operating company.