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Time to Pretend

A year after Character.AI was sued over the suicide of a teen who allegedly became obsessed with its chatbot, the company’s new C.E.O., Karandeep Anand, opens up about the company’s evolving business model, its $2.7 billion Google deal, and pivoting from companionship to entertainment.

Karanandeep Anand
"I think it’s important to remember that we’re making entertainment move forward, not trying to replace humans. It’s very, very important to constantly reinforce that in the product because otherwise, it becomes hard—our job is not to become a personal assistant," says Character.AI CEO Karanandeep Anand. Photo: Steve Vargo/Fortune/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Ian Krietzberg
August 14, 2025

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In 2021, the engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas set out to achieve something their previous employer, Google, seemed reluctant to do: launch a public A.I. chatbot. The result was Character.AI, a startup dedicated to building artificial general intelligence by scaling up large language models with the goal of creating personal, conversational assistants that could be “your own personal teacher, assistant, or even friend.” Last August, Google wrote the company a $2.7 billion check to license its models.