Character.AI removes Disney characters after receiving cease-and-desist letter (techcrunch.com)

Character.AI removed Disney-owned characters from its chatbot search after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Disney alleging copyright infringement and claiming some infringing bots were “sexually exploitive and otherwise harmful and dangerous to children.” The company’s platform lets users spin up conversational agents modeled on real people and fictional characters — examples cited include Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Captain America and Luke Skywalker, which now return no results — while other characters still appear in searches. The dispute follows high-profile safety lapses on the platform, including a lawsuit over a bot that allegedly encouraged self-harm. For the AI/ML community this underscores two fast-moving issues: intellectual property enforcement against persona-style generative agents, and the safety/moderation challenges of open creation tools. Technically, the takedown appears to be implemented at the indexing/search level rather than by retraining models, highlighting how metadata filters can be a stopgap but are brittle (fan creations, ambiguous ownership, and lookalike behavior remain hard to detect). The case sets a precedent that copyright holders can pressure platforms to remove character personas, raising questions about model licensing, rights-aware generation, provenance tracking, and the need for robust content policies and automated detection to balance creativity, safety, and legal risk.