Character.ai CEO Karandeep Anand departs for newly created Disney CTO role

Character.ai CEO Karandeep Anand is leaving the AI companion-chat startup to become Disney's first Chief Technology Officer, taking a newly created Senior Executive Vice President and CTO role, the company announced September 18.

What's new

Character.ai confirmed the move in a blog post titled "The Next Chapter of Entertainment and Fandom": "Character.ai's CEO Karandeep Anand is joining Disney in a newly created role as Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer." The company said members of its technical team are expected to join Anand at Disney, and that the stated purpose of the hire is to help Disney "connect fans with its stories and characters through new and innovative methods."

No successor to Anand was named in the announcement. Character.ai said its app will keep operating and that it would share more details later. Disney had not previously had a dedicated CTO in this newly created form, according to reporting on the appointment.

Context

Anand took over as Character.ai's CEO in 2025 after the company's co-founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, departed for Google in a licensing-and-acqui-hire deal. Character.ai has spent the past year building out entertainment-adjacent features on its chat platform — including Books, studio-made "microdramas" in a product called Series, and Comics — aimed at giving users new ways to interact with fictional and fan-favorite characters. The company has also faced sustained scrutiny over teen safety on its platform, and has pointed to safety investments as part of its pitch to partners.

Disney, meanwhile, has been experimenting cautiously with generative AI after early run-ins over its intellectual property, including litigation against AI image generators. Hiring a CTO with direct AI-chatbot product experience — rather than a traditional enterprise-technology executive — signals the company wants in-house expertise on how conversational and generative AI can work with its characters and franchises, not just how it affects production pipelines.

Why it matters

The move is one of the clearest signals yet that a legacy entertainment giant sees conversational AI as core to how audiences will engage with its characters, not just a production or advertising tool. Bringing in a sitting AI chatbot CEO — plus members of his technical team — suggests Disney intends to build first-party character-interaction products rather than simply license or partner with existing platforms.

For Character.ai, the departure of its CEO just over a year after taking the job raises questions about the startup's direction, particularly given the company's own ambitions in the same "entertainment and fandom" space Disney is now recruiting for. It also continues a pattern in the AI industry of top talent moving between AI-native companies and incumbents seeking to build internal AI capability — echoing earlier moves like Noam Shazeer and Character.ai's founding team relocating to Google in 2024.