After Hiring its CEO, Disney is Spending $60 million on Character.ai Employees

AI chatbot company Character.ai may have declared bankruptcy, but it's looking more and more like most of the company won't really disappear. Instead, it will continue to operate within The Walt Disney Company.

What's Happening:

• Last month, the Walt Disney Company announced it was hiring Character.ai CEO Karandeep Anand as its first Chief Technology Officer.
• Now, Business Insider reports that Disney will be bringing on 66 employees of the company and paying them a total of $60 million per year. An additional $30 million "aggregate retention pool" will also be available to those employees who stay with Disney.
• The move comes after a recent Disney layoff in which several hundred jobs were cut, including some in Disney's tech divisions.
• The information comes from the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing Character.ai filed on Tuesday. The company declared bankruptcy last week, citing "significant legal, regulatory, and operational headwinds." The AI chatbot company has faced lawsuits from families of users who claim teenagers harmed themselves following interactions with the chatbots.
• Disney is also in a position to pick up Character.ai's assets as part of a bankruptcy auction. The company has already placed a $20 million bid for the assets, which means in addition to having the company's staff, they'll end up with the product if no additional bids are made.
• Several state attorneys general have asked the bankruptcy judge to ensure that protections are put in place for whoever wins the auction in order to ensure that data, especially that of minors, is protected.

More Disney/AI News:

• An upcoming Disney video game is reported to be using an "AI-first" approach to development.
• Actor Nicolas Cage indicated some issues working with Amazon on Spider-Noir due to a request for an AI waiver, which he declined.
• Disney is currently looking for a Director of AI Enablement & Legal Engineering