Disney Budgets $180M Over Three Years for Character.AI Hires

A Delaware bankruptcy filing shows Disney has budgeted about $180 million over three years to compensate the roughly 66 Character.AI employees it hired away from the startup, with a further $30 million set aside as an "aggregate retention pool," according to a Bloomberg newsletter summarizing the term sheet.

The staff bill sits on top of Disney's separate $20 million stalking-horse bid for Character.AI's technology. What that $20 million actually buys, per the filing summary, is narrow: "the code behind the chatbot's training, safety and serving systems plus nine patents for $20 million, while the app, the brand, the user data, the chats and the finished models stay in the bankruptcy estate for anyone else who wants them."

Character Technologies filed its voluntary Chapter 11 petition in Delaware on October 12, 2026. On September 30 the company had roughly 86 full-time staff; by the petition date, 66 had accepted offers from Disney and 56 of those had formally resigned. The remaining 10 hold H-1B, TN or F-1 visas and are waiting for the US government to update their work authorizations before they can leave.

At the top of that migrating team is Karandeep Anand, Character.AI's CEO, whom Disney named its first-ever company-wide Chief Technology Officer effective October 2, reporting to CEO Josh D'Amaro and overseeing technology, AI platforms, product and engineering. Disney had sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist letter for copyright infringement in September 2025, roughly a year before hiring its chief executive.

The filing does not break the $180 million out between cash and equity, and the $30 million retention pool is described only in aggregate without per-head allocations. It also does not name any party likely to bid for the parts of Character.AI left in the estate.

This is our third Character.AI alert in a week, after the Chapter 11 filing itself and the compute-against-revenue breakdown from the same docket.