Connexion
This week, Character.AI declared bankruptcy. While some saw the fall of a chatbot platform as a harbinger for the industry, court filings indicate that the decision was actually a key part of a deal that has let Disney hire most of Character.AI’s staff—including its now former CEO Karandeep Anand—potentially acquire most of Character.AI’s technology, and avoid the beleaguered startup’s many legal liabilities and obligations.
In the past few years, Character.AI has faced multiple private lawsuits over the safety of its chatbots, as well as investigations from regulators around the world. In a declaration filed as part of the bankruptcy, Character.AI’s newly appointed CEO explained that the goal of the bankruptcy was to reach a “consensual resolution” with personal injury claimants and a group of states investigating the company, while maximizing the value of the company’s assets for shareholders.
The Disney deal seems to be structured so that whatever is left of Character.AI will retain responsibility for those legal battles, some of which are still ongoing.
Age verification is consuming the Internet. From social media bans in Australia to porn restrictions in half of US states, for many having to prove their age to access websites is becoming an everyday requirement. But one of the key technologies underpinning many of these age checks is about to seep into the offline world—with potentially life-changing consequences for people having their age predicted by AI.
Starting next year, the British government is planning to introduce facial age estimation—where AI scans your face and suggests how old you are—to help determine the age of asylum seekers arriving at the United Kingdom’s border. The move is believed to be the first time that a so-called facial age estimation (FAE) system has been used in this way. Many asylum seekers arriving in the UK will not have documents proving their age, and if children are incorrectly classed as adults, they can be stripped of some legal protections and placed in adult-only detention centers.
An investigation by WIRED and Lighthouse Reports, in collaboration with The Independent, has obtained an internal UK government report detailing its tests of FAE technologies. It shows how the systems regularly mistake children for adults and appear to contain serious bias problems, which directly impact the largest group of migrants subject to age assessments in 2025, according to data from the Home Office. The investigation raises questions about the effectiveness of the technology and whether it should be deployed in such high-stakes scenarios.
The Department of Homeland Security tried to obtain a Canadian man’s location information, activity logs, and other identifying information from Google after he criticized the Trump administration online following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis early this year.
Lawyers for the man, who has not been named, are alarmed in part because they say that the man has not entered the United States in more than a decade. “I don’t know what the government knows about our client’s residence, but it’s clear that the government isn’t stopping to find out,” says Michael Perloff, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia who is representing the man in a lawsuit against Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of DHS, over the summons. The lawsuit alleges that DHS violated the customs law that gives the agency the power to request records from businesses and other parties.
Perloff argues that the government is using the fact that big tech companies are based in the US to request information it would not otherwise be able to get. “It’s using that geographic fact to get information that otherwise would be totally outside of its jurisdiction,” he says. “I mean, we’re talking about the physical movements of a person who lives in Canada.”
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