Disney offers $20M for Character.AI tech it once attacked with cease-and-desist
Ars Technica AI · rss · 2026-10-14
In a bankruptcy proceeding that began yesterday, Disney offered $20 million for a non-exclusive perpetual license to certain Character.AI intellectual property. The twist: in September 2025 Disney publicly attacked Character.AI for stealing content and harming kids, sending a strongly worded cease-and-desist accusing the company of weaponizing Disney characters in ways that could damage its brand long-term.
More from Venture
- Build an AI language-learning game, get 1000 active users first: Oo's challenge — letandrewcook · 2026-10-14
- Dev says open source lets his Sora-style video business turn a profit where OpenAI can't — ctjlewis · 2026-10-14
- Sentry CEO: headless agent signups went to zero after months, so we killed the experiment — zeeg · 2026-10-14
- Crawler health-checks 62K paid APIs and MCP servers: ~1 in 10 is down — BudgetBon · 2026-10-14
- Overjoy's AI-native sales services exit stealth with $1.3M ARR and 2x headcount — julianweisser · 2026-10-14
- The ARR era is over: AI collapses SaaS multiples from 114x to 4x — akumar · 2026-10-14