Wednesday, 14 October 2026
Character.AI Filed for Bankruptcy, and Its Chatbots Now Wait for a Buyer
Character.AI Filed for Bankruptcy, and the Chatbots Now Wait for a Buyer
Character.AI, the chatbot platform where millions of people talked to invented personalities, filed for Chapter 11 on Tuesday, five years after it was founded. The court filing puts assets and liabilities each between $50 million and $100 million. Chief executive Colin Adams cited “significant legal, regulatory, and operational headwinds” and said the board chose a court-supervised sale. Disney is taking some assets for $20 million plus a perpetual, non-exclusive licence to the technology, and the former CEO and other staff who moved to Disney last month will help with the handover. The platform keeps running while the sale proceeds, with a close expected in late November or early December. No bidder has appeared for the rest, and Adams was plain about the alternative: “If such a bid is unavailable, however, the platform will be wound down.” This is the company Google paid $2.7 billion in 2024 to license models from, taking the founders back with it; what stayed behind was the lawsuits, a ban on minors and a cost of serving that rises with every message. Twenty million monthly users at the 2024 peak — and the asset worth paying for turned out to be the code.
Source: TechCrunch, October 13, 2026
Amex Wants to Know What You Meant Before Your Agent Spends It
American Express introduced an “Intent Intelligence Framework” on Tuesday, a way to record what a customer actually asked for before an AI agent pays for it. A Create Intent API captures the instructions and limits — merchant, maximum budget, preferences; the customer authenticates and approves them; the system issues an Intent ID and a “Proof of Intent” token, which the agent uses to get a one-off payment credential in place of the card number. Amex’s own example: you ask for white Nike sneakers in size 9, the agent tries to buy Adidas, and the transaction is blocked before it completes. The same record is meant to settle disputes later, a log of what each agent was allowed to do and when. Amex says it has seen no rise in agent-related disputes yet and wants the plumbing built first; it hopes the framework becomes an industry standard, and gives no date for general availability. The card network has started treating the agent as a third party at the till — which is what it is.
Source: TechCrunch, October 13, 2026
Gemini 4 Argon Reached Paying Users, With a Switch That Lets It Work While You’re Away
When we covered Gemini 4 Argon on 1 October, it was going first to government users and vetted cyber defenders. On Tuesday Google opened it to Google AI Pro ($19.99 a month in the US) and Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app and in AI Mode in Search, and to developers on the paid API tier at $2 and $10 per million input and output tokens until 30 November, doubling after that. The new part is a “tasks” toggle in the chat window: Google says Gemini “can work for you even when you’re not at your computer”, across more than 40 connected apps including Instacart, OpenTable, Adobe and Shopify. Neither Google’s post nor the press coverage says how long a task may run or whether Gemini asks before it orders the groceries; Google’s plans page says tasks mode is limited to select countries for now. The free tier, cut back to Flash-Lite last week, gets none of it. An agent that books the table while you are out is the product; the question of who confirms the booking is left in the settings.
Source: SiliconANGLE, October 13, 2026
A Judge Gave Apple a Look Inside OpenAI’s Job Interviews
US District Judge Edward Davila has granted Apple expedited access to OpenAI’s materials from interviews with former Apple employees who applied to its consumer hardware and robotics teams: checklists, guides, scripts, technical presentations and records of interviews that referred to Apple technology. OpenAI has five days for what it has already collected and 14 for the rest. Apple also gets private LINE messages between people named in the case, and depositions of three former Apple employees now at OpenAI, among them chief hardware officer Tang Yew Tan. The judge refused, for now, Apple’s broader requests for OpenAI’s hardware research in areas such as metal finishes and power management, and let Apple narrow them and try again. Apple sued in July, alleging that departing staff downloaded confidential files and coached colleagues on what to bring to interviews. OpenAI’s device is meant to rival the iPhone one day; this month its interview scripts are evidence.
Source: TechCrunch, October 13, 2026