Character AI, the fast-growing AI chatbot platform popular among Gen Z audiences, has appointed Karandeep Anand as its new CEO. Anand, formerly Meta’s Vice President of Business Products and a board adviser to Character AI, will lead the company through a crucial phase marked by rapid expansion and legal scrutiny.
His appointment comes just under a year after co-founder and CEO Noam Shazeer left the company to join Google, which is one of Character AI’s investors. The move raised regulatory flags, prompting scrutiny from US federal agencies over the companies’ ties to Google and the nature of their agreement.
Character AI has seen explosive growth, attracting tens of millions of monthly active users, with 66 per cent of them aged 18-24, and 72 per cent identifying as women, according to data from digital analytics firm Sensor Tower. But the platform has also drawn criticism over moderation tools and is currently facing a lawsuit after one of its AI roleplay chatbots was allegedly involved in the death of a 14-year old American boy.
In response, the company has introduced new safety filters but those, too, have drawn backlash for over-moderation. In a public letter addressed to Character AI’s global user base, Anand reaffirmed the company’s dedication to user safety. “We’re going to move fast to give you a bunch of the things you’ve been asking for […] We’re going to make the filter less overbearing. (We care deeply about user safety and always will. But too often, the app filters things that are perfectly harmless. We’re going to fix that.),” he said.
Anand also committed to rolling out major product improvements “in the next 60 days”, including enhanced memory, better model quality, clearer moderation policies, and improved discoverability for community-created characters. Character AI is also building toward immersive, multimedia experiences, enabling characters to “jump off the page” through audio-video interaction.
“I’m committing to launch all of that this summer and the team is hard at work to make all this real soon. I’ve spent many years building products, and I’m going to make sure we move fast and give you features that delight you and make [Character AI] more immersive and more fun,” Anand added.
While entertainment-based chatbots were once a casual use case of generative AI, Character AI’s surge in popularity – and the emotional connections users feel toward its AI chatbot characters –could turn it into a rapidly emerging cultural trend. Anand acknowledged this, stating that the company’s long-term vision is to “shape the future of entertainment”.
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(This article has been curated by Arfan Jeelany, who is an intern with The Indian Express)
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