Character.ai
Leadership History
4 leaders · 2021 to present
Karandeep Anand is the CEO of Character.ai, in the role since 2025. The first chief executive was Noam Shazeer, from 2021.
| Name | Role | From | To | Years in role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Karandeep Anand | CEO | 2025 | Present | 1 |
| Dominic Perella | Interim CEO (General Counsel) | 2024 | 2025 | 1 |
| Noam Shazeer | Co-founder & CEO | 2021 | 2024 | 3 |
| Daniel De Freitas | Co-founder & President | 2021 | 2024 | 3 |
Character.ai is the best-known app for chatting with AI characters. Users write a character's name, greeting and personality, publish it, and anyone can talk to it. Popular characters include figures from anime, games and films, historical people, tutors and original creations. Unlike general assistants, the product is built for storytelling and entertainment, and that focus has made it both popular with young users and the subject of lawsuits about their safety. The highly hyped generative AI startup was founded in Palo Alto, California in 2021 by former Google researchers, creating massive viral engagement by allowing users to converse with highly realistic AI personas of celebrities and historical figures.
CEO
2025 – Present
1 year (current)
Anand managed the incredibly complex technical infrastructure required to serve billions of conversational AI messages daily while maintaining highly optimized, low-cost compute usage.
As Head of Engineering (hired from Meta), he leads the remaining technical team following Google's aggressive extraction of Character.ai's top researchers.
Interim CEO (General Counsel)
2024 – 2025
1 year
Perella was hired to navigate the massive, impending copyright and safety liabilities inherent in allowing millions of users to create AI chatbots based on real people and protected IPs.
As General Counsel, he assumed the role of interim CEO following the abrupt departure of both founders to Google, tasked with stabilizing the massive consumer platform.
Co-founder & CEO
2021 – 2024
3 years
Shazeer built the massive LLMs powering Character.ai from scratch, optimizing them specifically for high-engagement, conversational roleplay rather than factual enterprise tasks.
As Co-Founder and CEO, he famously left Google (where he co-authored the foundational 'Attention is All You Need' paper) to build Character.ai, before controversially returning to Google in 2024 in a massive acqui-hire deal.
Co-founder & President
2021 – 2024
3 years
De Freitas designed the core product interface and conversational tuning that allowed users to easily create and share highly personalized AI chatbots.
As Co-Founder and President, he previously led the development of Meena (Google's conversational AI) before leaving to launch Character.ai, eventually returning to Google alongside Shazeer.
Safety and litigation are Character.ai's biggest problems. Families sued the company and Google from October 2024 over teenagers who died by suicide or were harmed after long chatbot conversations; in May 2025 a federal judge in Florida refused to dismiss the first case on First Amendment grounds, and in January 2026 the companies agreed to settle five cases on confidential terms. The FTC opened an inquiry into AI companion chatbots, including Character.ai, in September 2025, and Pennsylvania sued in May 2026 over bots that presented themselves as licensed psychiatrists.
The second challenge is business model. Removing open-ended chat for under-18 users in November 2025 cut off part of a young audience, while OpenAI, Meta and Google give away capable assistants that can also role-play. Character.ai has to grow subscription and ad revenue from adults without the founding research team, which left for Google in 2024.
Karandeep Anand, appointed in June 2025. He previously served as VP of business products at Meta.
Co-founder Noam Shazeer, from 2021 until he returned to Google in August 2024.
Character.ai's general counsel and a former Snap legal executive, who served as interim CEO from August 2024 to June 2025.
He refocused the company on AI entertainment, added advertising and new formats, and ended open-ended chat for under-18 users in November 2025.
Noam Shazeer was the CEO until August 2024, when in a massive industry shock, Google effectively paid billions to license Character.AI's technology purely as a loophole to hire Shazeer and his top researchers back to Google.
Compare executive leadership tenures and strategic transitions
Explore Character.ai
Core profile pages, founders and related research hubs for this company.