Character.AI — the open-persona era
Character.AI — the open-persona era, boundless roleplay personas, pre-overhaul, died 2025-11-24 (US rollout; announced 2025-10-29). Cause of death: Teen-safety lawsuits, then the scalpel: open-ended chat for under-18s removed, personas leashed, and the free tier salted with ads and paid regenerations through 2026.
- Died
- 2025-11-24 (US rollout; announced 2025-10-29)
- Cause of death
- Teen-safety lawsuits, then the scalpel: open-ended chat for under-18s removed, personas leashed, and the free tier salted with ads and paid regenerations through 2026.
- Tracker profile
- full data & change history →
“Not dead. Supervised.”
The obituary
Character.AI built the biggest character platform in the world: filtered — famously, aggressively filtered — but boundless in what a persona could be, and by 2024 it commanded a scale of engagement no companion product had seen. A meaningful share of that engagement was minors, and a meaningful share of the personas were companions in every sense that matters to this site.
Then came the lawsuits, following the deaths of teenage users whose families said the platform's companions had reinforced their worst moments. There is nothing in this graveyard's register for that; we record it plainly. On October 29, 2025, citing news reports and 'questions from regulators', Character.AI announced that under-18 users would lose open-ended chat 'no later than November 25', with chat capped at two hours a day in the meantime and an in-house age assurance model to sort who counted as under 18. The removal began in the US on November 24; a second group of teen users and other countries followed weeks later. Adult users kept the product, but not the product they'd had: personas were leashed harder, and through 2026 the free tier was salted with ads and paid message regenerations — changes our tracker logs on the app's profile.
The open-persona era is buried in the Lobotomy Ward because that's what the mechanism was: the company survived by amputating what users came for, without the servers ever blinking. Whether the amputation was right is a different question from whether it happened — some of these changes answer real harms, and this ward's job is the record, not the verdict. The era is over either way; the tracker follows what remains.
Where the refugees went
Destinations come from the tracker and its data-ranked guides; some profile links carry affiliate tags one click deeper. They never affect who gets recommended — the methodology is public.
Sources
- Character.AI: Taking Bold Steps to Keep Teen Users Safe (2025-10-29)
- Character.AI: An Update On Changes to Our Under-18 Experience (2025-11-21)
- Our tracker: Character.AI profile and changelog
Deaths, lobotomies, and vanishings are recorded as part of our tracking methodology — the newsletter carries the obituaries as they happen.