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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
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5 min read
Here’s how Character.AI’s new CEO plans to address fears around
kids’ use of chatbots
By Clare Duffy, CNN
Updated:
7:30 AM EDT, Thu July 3, 2025
Source: CNN
When Karandeep Anand’s 5-year-old daughter gets home from school,
they fire up the artificial intelligence chatbot platform Character.AI
so she can chat about her day with her favorite characters, such as
“Librarian Linda.”
Anand’s experience using the product as a parent might be helpful now
that he’s Character.AI’s new chief executive, a change the company
last month.
He’s taken on the top job at a complicated moment for the company,
which lets users talk to a variety of AI-generated personas.
Character.AI faces fierce competition in an increasingly crowded space,
as well as from families who claim the service exposed their children
to inappropriate content and failed to implement .
Character.AI has also received tough questions about safety from , and
one advocacy group that AI companion apps should not be used by kids
under 18. Even for adult users, experts have raised alarms about people
to AI characters.
Anand brings experience at some of the biggest tech companies to his
new role leading Character.AI’s approximately 70-person team. He
spent 15 years at Microsoft and six years at Meta, including as vice
president and head of business products at the social media giant. He
also served as a board advisor for Character.AI before joining as CEO.
And he told CNN he sees a bright future for the platform in interactive
AI entertainment.
In other words, rather than people consuming “brain rot” on social
media for entertainment, Anand wants them co-creating stories and
conversations with Character.AI for fun.
“AI can power a very, very powerful personal entertainment experience
unlike anything we’ve seen in the last 10 years in social media, and
definitely nothing like what TV used to be,” Anand said in an
interview.
Unlike multi-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT, Character.AI offers range
of different chatbots that are often modeled after celebrities and
fictional characters. Users can also create their own for conversations
or role play. Another distinction is that Character.AI bots respond
with human-like conversational cues, adding references to facial
expressions or gestures into their replies.
The personas of AI characters on the app vary widely, from romantic
partners to language tutors or Disney characters. It also features
characters like “Friends hot mom,” which describes itself as
“curvy, busty, kind, loving, shy, motherly, sensual”; and
“Therapist,” which calls itself a “licensed CBT therapist,”
although it features a disclaimer that it is not a real person or
licensed professional.
“(We’re) doubling down on entertainment, doubling down on trust and
safety,” Anand said. “And a lot of the work we want to do is enable
an entirely new creator ecosystem around AI entertainment.”
Youth safety on Character.AI
Character.AI was first sued by a parent — a who alleges her
14-year-old son died by suicide after developing an inappropriate
relationship with chatbots on the platform — last October. Two months
later, two more families against the company, accusing it of providing
sexual content to their children and encouraging self-harm and
violence.
Since then, the company has implemented a range of new safety measures,
including a pop-up that directs users who mention self-harm or suicide
to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. It also updated its AI
model for users under the age of 18 to reduce the likelihood that they
encounter sensitive or suggestive content, and gives parents the option
to receive a weekly email about their teen’s activity on the
platform.
Anand said he’s confident in the improvements Character.AI has made
since last year, but that work to keep the platform safe, especially
for young users, continues. Character.AI’s policies technically
require users to be over the age of 13, although it does not ask for
information to verify that users are signing up with the correct
birthdate.
“The tech and the industry and the user base is constantly evolving
(so) that we can never let the guard off. We have to constantly stay
ahead of the curve,” Anand said.
He added that the company continues to test how people could misuse new
features to prevent abuse, such as a video generator that lets users
animate their bots. In the days following the tool’s arrival, users
unsuccessful attempts to test its limits by creating fake videos of
prominent figures like Elon Musk.
“We had to red team the product for such a long time to make sure you
cannot use this for any negative use case like deepfakes or
bullying,” Anand said.
Those efforts aside, Anand said in an to Character.AI users last month
that one of his top priorities is to make the platform’s safety
filter “less overbearing,” adding that “too often, the app
filters things that are perfectly harmless.”
He told CNN that things like mentions of blood when users are engaging
in “vampire fan fiction role play” — something he says he’s a
fan of — might be censored under the current model, which he wants to
update to better understand context while balancing the need for
safety.
Leading in the competitive AI space
Among Anand’s other key objectives: encouraging more creators to join
the platform to make new chatbot characters and upgrading the social
feed where users can share content they’ve created with Character.AI
chatbots.
The latter feature is similar to an app Meta launched this year that
allows people to publicly share their prompts and AI-generated
creations. Meta when apparently confused users shared conversations
that contained embarrassing or personal details — a reminder of the
privacy challenges that can come with AI tools.
But the social element could help further differentiate Character.AI
from bigger competitors like ChatGPT, which users are also increasingly
.
Another challenge Anand will face as CEO is retaining and growing the
company’s workforce, as an AI talent war heats up across the tech
industry. In a sign of the competition for top talent, Meta has pay
packages and bonuses worth hundreds of millions of dollars to grow its
new superintelligence team. Character.AI co-founder and former CEO Noam
Shazeer was also last year, where he’d previously built
conversational AI technology.
“It is hard, I will not lie,” Anand said. “The good news for me
as CEO is all the people we have here are very, very passionate and
mission driven.”
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