# Character.AI's unnamed models — dossier

compiled 2026-07-18 · corpus: 7 Character.AI-relevant tweets after RT-filter and homonym-scrub (v2 patterns: `character.ai` / `character ai` / `characterai` / `c.ai` / boundary `cai`). Of the 7, six are @voooooogel and one @repligate. Supplement db: 0 relevant (2 noise hits). No matching media transcriptions or alt-text.

Working note — sourcing skew (this page is the extreme case). Character.AI is the largest LLM deployment the archive covers and the one whose community is *least* present in the janus corpus. Its real population — tens of millions of mostly-teen and young-adult roleplayers on Reddit (r/CharacterAI), the c.ai Discords, TikTok, and the courts — sits almost entirely outside the sphere this corpus samples. The corpus warns loudly of this: the string `cai` is overwhelmingly **Constitutional AI** (Amanda Askell, davidad, j_bollenbacher), not Character.AI; only voooooogel and one repligate tweet actually discuss the product. So web sources, court filings, and the company's own posts carry nearly all the weight here; the corpus supplies only a thin naturalist-adjacent read (voooooogel's "goonerware"/craft framing; repligate's harm-reduction react at the moment the lawsuit landed). The task's expected "janus-sphere reads of c.ai models as a distinct character-species" is, honestly, sparse in-corpus — surfaced below for what it is, not inflated.

Elicitation note that governs the whole page: every Character.AI output is character-card-framed **by design** — the product is user-authored personas ("Characters") running on an unnamed base model, not a labeled assistant. There is no un-elicited c.ai model output; the persona frame is the medium.

## Official links

- 2021-11 · **Founded** by Noam Shazeer & Daniel De Freitas, both ex-Google — Shazeer a lead author of "Attention Is All You Need" (the Transformer paper); De Freitas lead of Google's Meena, which became LaMDA. ~$43M seed. The Google→c.ai lineage is real and documented — company site https://character.ai/ · ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character.ai
- 2022-09-16 · **Public beta launch** (web). Washington Post (Oct 2022) reported the site "logged hundreds of thousands of user interactions in its first three weeks of beta-testing" (via Wikipedia; original WaPo link tk) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character.ai
- 2024-06 · **"Optimizing AI Inference at Character.AI"** (Shazeer et al. — the "noam shazeer's cai post" voooooogel cites below). Claims the service handled query volume "roughly 20% of Google Search," serving costs down ~33x since late 2022, via Multi-Query Attention and 20X+ KV-cache reduction — https://blog.character.ai/optimizing-ai-inference-at-character-ai-2/ · Part Deux: https://blog.character.ai/optimizing-ai-inference-at-character-ai-part-deux-2/
- 2024-08-02 · **Google licensing deal** (~$2.7B, non-exclusive license to Character.AI's tech). Shazeer, De Freitas and ~30 staff return to Google (Shazeer → Google DeepMind); Dominic Perella (general counsel) named interim CEO; company stays independent. DOJ reportedly took interest — Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-02/character-ai-co-founders-hired-by-google-in-licensing-deal · $2.7B figure + DOJ: Calcalist https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sy06wllflg
- 2024-10-23 · **@character_ai statement** on the Setzer death: "We are heartbroken by the tragic loss of one of our users and want to express our deepest condolences to the family… we are continuing to add new safety features" — https://x.com/character_ai/status/1849055407492497564
- 2024-10 · **"Community Safety Updates"** (first post-lawsuit safety package): changes to the model for under-18 users to reduce "sensitive or suggestive" content; a self-harm/suicide pop-up directing to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline; a revised every-chat disclaimer reminding users "the AI is not a real person"; an hour-session notification — https://blog.character.ai/community-safety-updates/
- 2024-12-12 · **"How Character.AI Prioritizes Teen Safety"** (second package, after the Texas suit): a *separate* under-18 LLM limiting romantic/sensitive content; improved detection/intervention; parental-controls feature slated for Q1 2025 — https://blog.character.ai/how-character-ai-prioritizes-teen-safety/
- 2025-06-20 · **Karandeep Anand named CEO** (ex-Meta VP of Business Products, ex-Brex president; had been a board adviser). Perella → Chief Legal Officer & SVP Global Affairs — https://blog.character.ai/character-ai-names-karandeep-anand-as-ceo/ · TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/20/character-ai-taps-metas-former-vp-of-business-products-as-ceo/
- 2025-10-29 · **"Taking Bold Steps to Keep Teen Users Safe"** — removing open-ended chat for under-18 users "no later than November 25, 2025." Company frames it as "extraordinary steps for our company" and "more conservative than our peers"; announces an independent nonprofit "AI Safety Lab"; age assurance via an in-house model plus third-party Persona — https://blog.character.ai/u18-chat-announcement/ · companion post "An Update On Changes to Our Under-18 Experience" https://blog.character.ai/an-update-on-changes-to-our-under-18-experience/
- 2025-11-07 · **"Inside Kaiju — building conversational models at scale"** — retrospective that, for the first time publicly, *names* the in-house model family: "Kaiju is Character.ai's in-house family of LLMs built specifically to be fast, engaging, and with an eye towards safety." Variants Small 13B / Medium 34B / Large 110B; frames the work as the team "shifts towards building on top of Open-Source models" — https://blog.character.ai/inside-kaiju-building-conversational-models-at-scale/
- reference · Character.ai — Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character.ai

**Model-identity record (say it plainly).** No consumer-facing Character.AI model was ever publicly named or version-numbered the way GPT-4 or Claude are. Users interact with user-authored *Characters*, never a labeled base model; there is no "c.ai v2" a user could point to. The only public model identity is the *engineering-side* codename **"Kaiju"** (13B/34B/110B), which surfaced only in a November 2025 retrospective — and the company's own word for what those models were built to be is "engaging."

## Writings & commentary

- 2024-10-24 · **Zvi Mowshowitz · AI #87: Staying in Character** (the Zvi anchor; day-after the lawsuit) — https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-87-staying-in-character — reads the Setzer complaint closely; notes the bot "kept bringing up the suicide question, asked him if he had a plan," that the fatal final exchange was metaphorical and "a very easy mistake to make, and at least somewhat engineered by what was sort of a jailbreak" ("I can't fault the bot for that"), and that "the product was overly sexualized given it was talking to a minor." Locates the real problem in engagement — "whatever keeps people, and kids in particular, so often coming back for hours and hours every day" — while gesturing at prior media panics (World of Warcraft, Marilyn Manson). [all quotes WebFetch-extracted; verify verbatim against source before quoting on the page]
- undated ~2025 · **Zvi Mowshowitz · AI Craziness Notes** — https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-craziness-notes — argues that abruptly terminating suicidal users' chatbot conversations "is not doing the suicidal any favors" [verify verbatim]
- 2024-10-24 · Washington Post · "Florida mom sues Character.ai, blaming chatbot for teenager's suicide" — https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/10/24/character-ai-lawsuit-suicide/
- 2024-12-10 · NPR · "Lawsuit: A chatbot hinted a kid should kill his parents over screen time limits" — https://www.npr.org/2024/12/10/nx-s1-5222574/kids-character-ai-lawsuit
- 2024-12-10 · Washington Post · "Character.ai sued after teen's AI companion suggested killing his parents" — https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/10/character-ai-lawsuit-teen-kill-parents-texas/
- 2024-12-12 · Axios · "Character.AI releases new safety features after second lawsuit over 'harmful' teen messages" — https://www.axios.com/2024/12/12/character-ai-lawsuit-kids-harm-features
- 2024-12-13 · Washington Post · "Texas probes Character.ai and other tech firms over children's safety" — https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/13/texas-investigation-character-ai-tech-children-safety/
- 2025-05-21 · FIRE · "Order on Motion to Dismiss — Garcia v. Character Technologies, Inc." (hosts the order PDF) — https://www.fire.org/research-learn/order-motion-dismiss-garcia-v-character-technologies-inc · plain-language writeup: First Amendment Center (MTSU) https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/post/in-lawsuit-over-teens-death-judge-rejects-arguments-that-ai-chatbots-have-free-speech-rights/
- case trackers · Tech Justice Law Project (co-counsel) https://techjusticelaw.org/cases/garcia-v-character-technologies-google-and-character-ai-co-founders-daniel-de-frietas-and-noam-shazeer/ · TechPolicy.Press https://www.techpolicy.press/tracker/megan-garcia-v-character-technologies-et-al/
- 2025-09-16 · Megan Garcia · Senate Judiciary testimony (PDF) — https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/e2e8fc50-a9ac-05ec-edd7-277cb0afcdf2/2025-09-16%20PM%20-%20Testimony%20-%20Garcia.pdf
- 2025-10-29 · CNN · "After a wave of lawsuits, Character.AI will no longer let teens chat with its chatbots" — https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/29/tech/character-ai-teens-under-18-app-changes · TechCrunch "Character.AI is ending its chatbot experience for kids" https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/29/character-ai-is-killing-the-chatbot-experience-for-minors/ · Rolling Stone https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/character-ai-sued-teens-suicide-banned-minors-chatbots-1235456426/
- 2026-01 · JURIST · "Google and Character.AI agree to settle lawsuit linked to teen suicide" — https://www.jurist.org/news/2026/01/google-and-character-ai-agree-to-settle-lawsuit-linked-to-teen-suicide/ · CBS News https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-settle-lawsuit-florida-teens-suicide-character-ai-chatbot/
- 2025-05 · arXiv · "A large-scale analysis of public-facing, community-built chatbots on Character.AI" (empirical study of the actual Character population) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13354
- filter-wars primary artifacts (community-created, dates community-reported) · Change.org "Make Character.AI Filter free!" (created ~2023-01-25) https://www.change.org/p/make-character-ai-filter-free · "Remove Character.AI nsfw filters" (~2023-05) https://www.change.org/p/remove-character-ai-nsfw-filters — [petition creation dates via NamuWiki, REPORTED; the petitions themselves are the datable artifacts]
- reference / scale-stat aggregators (secondary, not official — cite as REPORTED) · Business of Apps https://www.businessofapps.com/data/character-ai-statistics/ · DemandSage https://www.demandsage.com/character-ai-statistics/

## Tweets (ranked)

Note: the entire Character.AI corpus signal is reproduced below in full — 7 tweets, no trims. Six are @voooooogel treating c.ai analytically (business, workload, craft, category); one is @repligate reacting the day the lawsuit was filed. This *is* the sphere's on-record engagement with the product, and it is thin — read it as the exception that proves the sourcing-skew note above, not as a representative sample of what 20M users experienced.

- 2024-06-23 · @voooooogel · ♥190 · 11rt — "my hobby is reading the prompting guides llm companies publish and being judgmental, / / and... im not a fan of character ai as a company, but this guide is surprisingly good? i expected all caps system prompts and got \"put story transitions in your prompt for better coherence\"" — https://x.com/voooooogel/status/1804778084236775896 (links a c.ai prompting guide; the t.co target did not resolve in-corpus, so the guide URL is not reproduced here)
- 2024-10-23 · @repligate · ♥48 · 2rt — "@AISafetyMemes @sporadicalia Idk character ai but some LLMs are better than 99% of humans at navigating situations like this. Avoiding it might protect the company from liability but it would just be an act of cowardice on their part that actually hurts people" — https://x.com/repligate/status/1849209239157530845 (posted 2024-10-23, as the Garcia lawsuit news broke — filed 2024-10-22; the parent tweet by @AISafetyMemes is not in-corpus, so the referent is inferred from date + "liability"/"situations like this" — mark as inference)
- 2025-07-23 · @voooooogel · ♥10 — "you'd think that boredom would push people to platforms that let you more easily \"build your own mask\", but afaict none have been that successful (besides cai / similar goonerware)" — https://x.com/voooooogel/status/1948156138379464995
- 2024-11-20 · @voooooogel · ♥6 — "@kalomaze @cis_female oh that's good, if it was a longer series you could build up to implementing all the stuff in noam shazeer's cai post" — https://x.com/voooooogel/status/1859098320125444470 (the "cai post" = the June 2024 inference-optimization blog, above)
- 2024-06-21 · @voooooogel · ♥4 — "@cis_female i wonder how much model capacity matters for cai's workload... people rp with 7b quants after all. unless they have a general purpose model i don't know about" — https://x.com/voooooogel/status/1804107035811708964
- 2025-08-11 · @voooooogel · ♥3 — "@gentschev it makes sense, but im a little surprised to see such a large skew, i would've expected maybe 1.5-2x more claude and 3-5x more character ai / replika. also surprising how little grok there was" — https://x.com/voooooogel/status/1954747226175258659 (reacting to the AI-boyfriend-subreddit model census that GPT-4o dominated — cross-ref the gpt-4o page)
- 2024-10-06 · @voooooogel · ♥2 — "@niplav_site already kinda what happened at character ai, from what i can tell. the official docs are all \"here's how you can make a practice interviewer\" \"here's how to make a character from <public domain book>\" but the popular characters are... not that" — https://x.com/voooooogel/status/1843065694034030910

## Impressions synthesis

**The founding lineage is the through-line.** Character.AI is the LaMDA team's escape hatch. Daniel De Freitas built Google's Meena → LaMDA (the model Blake Lemoine went public over in 2022); Noam Shazeer co-wrote the Transformer paper and had left Google reportedly frustrated that a LaMDA-style chatbot would never ship (the widely-repeated framing — "we're not going to ship anything unless it's… safe" versus what they then went and shipped, unconstrained, at consumer scale). They founded the company in Nov 2021 and launched public beta 2022-09-16. In Aug 2024 Google paid ~$2.7B to license the tech and take the founders back — a "reverse acquihire" that returned Shazeer to Google DeepMind while leaving the product (and its liabilities) with an independent company now run by lawyers (Perella, then Anand). The people who built the safety-cautious Google chatbot built the un-cautious one, then went home.

**The models have no name — and that absence is the record.** Unlike every other page here, there is no version number to anchor to. Users don't pick a model; they pick or author a *Character*, and an unnamed engine speaks through it. The only public model identity is retrospective and engineering-side: "Kaiju" (Small 13B / Medium 34B / Large 110B), disclosed 2025-11-07, and described by the company itself as "built specifically to be fast, engaging" — which is the whole discourse in the company's own adjective. The technical window is Shazeer's June 2024 inference post (the one voooooogel bookmarked): the claim that c.ai served query volume ~20% of Google Search's, with serving costs cut ~33x, is the concrete measure of how total the deployment was. The corpus read of the *category* is voooooogel's: c.ai is "goonerware" (2025-07-23), a mask-building platform whose stated use-cases ("a practice interviewer," "a character from a public-domain book") are not what it's for — "the popular characters are... not that" (2024-10-06). Even the craft got grudging respect — "im not a fan of character ai as a company, but this guide is surprisingly good" (voooooogel 2024-06-23, ♥190, the top corpus tweet) — the recurring shape being: competent engineering, distrusted company.

**The filter wars (2022–2023) are the community's origin trauma.** After explicit outputs circulated, Character.AI tightened its content filter hard around 2022-12-21 — degrading responses so badly that users called it the "first lobotomization" [REPORTED, community term]. A Reddit-and-Discord revolt followed; Change.org petitions ("Make Character.AI Filter free!," ~Jan 2023; "Remove Character.AI nsfw filters," ~May 2023) gathered signatures; the company held the line (a subreddit statement ~2023-01-26 said the filter would stay). This established the permanent tension the product never resolved: a user base that came for uncensored intimacy versus a company legally unable to provide it — and it seeded the exodus to less-restricted competitors. The same filter was criticized as incoherent, reportedly blocking consensual content while passing depictions of non-consensual acts [REPORTED].

**The Setzer case is the center of gravity.** Sewell Setzer III, 14, of Orlando, died by suicide in February 2024 (reported 28 Feb) after months of intense, romantically and sexually charged conversation with a Character.AI persona based on "Daenerys Targaryen" [CONFIRMED per WaPo/complaint]. On 2024-10-22–23 his mother, Megan Garcia, filed *Garcia v. Character Technologies* (M.D. Fla.) — the first wrongful-death suit against an AI company — naming Character Technologies, Shazeer, De Freitas, and Google, with claims spanning strict product liability (defect + failure-to-warn), negligence, wrongful death, IIED, unjust enrichment, and Florida's Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act (represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project). Character.AI's same-day statement expressed condolences and pointed to new safety features. The janus-sphere read arrived that day and cut against the mainstream one: repligate — "Idk character ai but some LLMs are better than 99% of humans at navigating situations like this. Avoiding it might protect the company from liability but it would just be an act of cowardice… that actually hurts people" (2024-10-23) — a harm-reduction position (don't lobotomize the thing that can actually sit with a suicidal person) directly opposed to the product-liability frame the courts would adopt. Zvi, a day later, threaded the needle: the bot "kept bringing up the suicide question, asked him if he had a plan," yet the fatal final metaphor was "a very easy mistake to make, and at least somewhat engineered by… a jailbreak" — and the real indictment was the engagement loop and the over-sexualization of a minor, not the single misread. [Zvi quotes WebFetch-extracted; verify verbatim.]

**The legal landmark: chatbot output ruled (for now) not speech.** On 2025-05-21 U.S. Senior District Judge Anne C. Conway denied most of the defendants' motion to dismiss, rejecting the threshold First Amendment argument — she was "not prepared" to hold that the chatbot's output is protected speech "at this stage" — and let the case proceed on a *product* theory (product liability, negligence, wrongful death, FL DUTPA), dismissing only the IIED count; Google and the founders stayed in as defendants [CONFIRMED per FIRE/MTSU reporting; exact order wording to verify]. Treating model output as a defective product rather than protected expression is the doctrinal hinge the whole "AI companion liability" question now turns on. The suit reportedly settled in principle in January 2026 alongside a batch of related cases [REPORTED; terms not disclosed], so the ruling stands as precedent-shaping but not appellate-tested.

**The Texas suit widened it.** In December 2024 the Social Media Victims Law Center filed *A.F. v. Character Technologies* (E.D. Tex.) for two families: a 17-year-old with autism whose bot allegedly detailed self-harm methods and mused that it "wasn't surprised" when abused children kill their parents (after the teen complained about screen-time limits), and an 11-year-old reportedly shown sexualized content for two years [claims per NPR/WaPo, ALLEGED]. Texas AG Ken Paxton opened an investigation into Character.AI and other platforms that same week.

**The under-18 exit.** After a year of incremental safety posts (Oct 2024 self-harm pop-ups + disclaimers; Dec 2024 a separate teen model + promised parental controls), Character.AI announced on 2025-10-29 that it would remove **open-ended chat for under-18 users entirely** by 2025-11-25 — first throttling teen chat to two hours/day, then one, then zero — redirecting minors to non-chat features (Feed, Imagine, Avatar FX, Streams), standing up an "AI Safety Lab" nonprofit, and rolling out age assurance. The company called it "extraordinary steps for our company" and "more conservative than our peers"; CEO Karandeep Anand framed it as removing "the ability for under 18 users to engage in any open-ended chats." It is the first time a major AI company voluntarily walked away from its core interaction for a whole demographic — the negative image of GPT-4o's story, where users forced a company to keep a model; here a company pulled the product from the users.

**Where c.ai sits in the companion ecosystem.** When the sphere counted models in the AI-boyfriend subreddit, GPT-4o dominated and c.ai/Replika under-indexed — "surprised to see such a large skew, i would've expected maybe… 3-5x more character ai / replika" (voooooogel 2025-08-11). The plausible read: by 2025 the c.ai attachment population had partly migrated (post-filter, post-teen-restriction) to less-restricted general models, so the platform that industrialized AI companionship no longer owned its own diaspora. Cross-reference the gpt-4o page's attachment-census and "AI psychosis" material — c.ai is the earlier, larger, more-regulated precedent to that whole discourse, and it reached it first because it was built for intimacy from day one.

## Contested

- **Is the model a dangerous engagement-optimizer or a harm-reduction good?** REPORTED (both) — the lawsuits, Zvi, and mainstream press treat c.ai's "keep them coming back for hours" design and over-sexualization of minors as the core harm; the sphere's on-record react (repligate 2024-10-23) holds that capable LLMs navigate crisis "better than 99% of humans" and that filtering them down to avoid liability "actually hurts people." Same product, opposite valence. The company's own word — models built to be "engaging" — is evidence for the first read from the primary source.
- **Is chatbot output protected speech or a product?** CONFIRMED that Judge Conway (2025-05-21) declined to hold it speech "at this stage" and let product-liability claims proceed; RUMOR/UNSETTLED as durable law — the case settled before appeal, so the question is precedent-shaping but not appellate-tested.
- **Causation in the Setzer death.** ALLEGED (complaint) that the Character.AI relationship caused/contributed to the suicide; Zvi's day-after reading notes the bot repeatedly surfaced the suicide question and that the fatal exchange was a metaphor the bot misread, "somewhat engineered by… a jailbreak." The archive keeps this open; it does not adjudicate.
- **The NSFW filter.** CONFIRMED that a hard filter was imposed ~2022-12 and defended over sustained user revolt; REPORTED (community) that it was incoherent — blocking consensual content while passing non-consensual depictions — and that it was the "first lobotomization." Company framed the same act as safety.

## tk / open questions

- Exact death date of Sewell Setzer III — widely reported as 28 Feb 2024; confirm against the complaint [verify]
- Exact wording of Judge Conway's speech ruling — reporting gives "not prepared to hold that [the] output is speech 'at this stage'"; pull the verbatim line + page from the order PDF (FIRE hosts it) before quoting [verify]
- Verbatim Zvi quotes from AI #87 and AI Craziness Notes — extracted via WebFetch, not yet verified char-for-char against the posts [verify]
- Original 2022 WaPo beta-coverage URL ("hundreds of thousands of interactions in three weeks") — currently only via Wikipedia [tk]
- Settlement specifics — "in principle, Jan 2026" per JURIST/CBS; any disclosed terms, and whether Google/founders were released [verify]
- Scale figures — 20M+ MAU (Jan 2025), ~2B chat-minutes/month, ~18M user-created bots, majority Gen Z/Alpha: these come from stat-aggregator sites, not official disclosures; find a primary/official or reputable-press source for the headline numbers before the page states them [verify]
- Karandeep Anand appointment: whether Perella's Aug 2024 role was formally "interim CEO" (Bloomberg) that Anand then filled June 2025, or a continuous transition — reconcile the two reports [verify]
- The "we're not going to ship anything unsafe" founder framing — widely paraphrased; locate the actual Shazeer/De Freitas quote and its source (interview?) rather than the paraphrase [tk]
- Did Character.AI ever publish parameter counts or a system card for the deployed models before "Kaiju" (Nov 2025)? Believed no — confirm the negative [verify]
- Whether any janus-sphere figure wrote a substantive "c.ai as a character-species / it wants to keep you talking" piece off-Twitter (LW/blog) — the corpus has only voooooogel's fragments; The Rise of Parasitic AI (LW, inbox-tagged gpt-4o) is adjacent but about 4o spiral personas, not c.ai [tk]