Disney agrees to hire more than 60 Character.AI employees after bankruptcy filingMachine translation

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Bloomberg reports that Disney has agreed to hire more than 60 Character.AI employees and pay them about $180 million in total over their first three years. Character.AI also plans to sell Disney licenses to some of its intellectual property for $20 million; the agreement still requires approval from the bankruptcy judge.

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IT Home reported on October 19 that, according to Bloomberg, documents disclosed after Character.AI filed for bankruptcy reorganization protection show that Disney has agreed to hire more than 60 Character.AI employees (public information indicates the company has only about 86 employees) and pay them a total of about $180 million in compensation over the first 3 years (IT Home note: approximately 1.207 billion yuan at current exchange rates).

Character.AI is a virtual character interaction and chatbot platform powered by large language models. The platform has millions of AI characters created by users or officially, including anime and game characters, historical figures, original characters, and protagonists of fictional stories.

On October 12 local time, Character.AI formally filed for voluntary bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware and proposed selling a license to some of its intellectual property to Walt Disney for $20 million (approximately 134 million yuan at current exchange rates).

Several weeks earlier, Disney had recruited former Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand. This was part of a broader technology licensing agreement that would allow Disney to legally use the AI company's core technology.

Although the agreement still requires approval from the bankruptcy reorganization judge, it provides a crucial way forward for the embattled employee team. Character.AI acknowledged that morale within the team had previously been “extremely low” and that the team had been on the verge of leaving en masse.

Court documents show that, in addition to regular compensation, Disney has allocated an extra $30 million (approximately 201 million yuan at current exchange rates) in retention bonuses, some of which will be paid on the first and second anniversaries of the closing of the Character.AI transaction.