Character.ai Filed for Bankruptcy. How to Export Your Chats Before the Sale

Character.ai filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 12, and the only bid on the table so far is Disney's $20 million for a license to some of its IP, which doesn't cover the app you chat in. If you have two years of roleplay, a dozen custom characters, or a chat log you actually care about, you have roughly six weeks to export your Character.ai chats before a court decides who ends up with the company and your data.

Character Technologies started a voluntary Chapter 11 process in federal court in Delaware on October 12, 2026. The company expects the court-supervised sale to finish "by the end of November or perhaps early December 2026." If no bid keeps the platform running, the official update says it "will be wound down."

Below I go through what the announcement actually promises, how to request the official export, what the CAI Tools extension gets access to, and how I'd rebuild the characters in SillyTavern + Ollama on your own machine.

What Character.ai's bankruptcy announcement says about your data

The announcement on the Character.ai blog is short. It commits to four things:

• The platform stays up and all services remain accessible for now.
• Paid subscriptions keep billing as normal, and subscribers get notice before paid features change.
• User data stays covered by the existing Privacy Policy.
• You can export your data or delete your account from the app or the website.

The FAQ heading literally asks "What happens to user data and chats?" and then the answer never mentions chats. User-created characters don't come up at all.

The buyer side doesn't help much. According to The Next Web, Disney's $20 million opening bid buys a non-exclusive, perpetual license to certain IP and certain legal claims, plus a deal to lend back former Character.ai staff it hired so the platform can keep running safely for a while. Nothing in the coverage says Disney is buying the consumer app. The $20 million is a floor that other bidders can top, and the filing puts assets and liabilities at $50 million to $100 million.

So the floor bid might keep the lights on for a while, and that's all it promises. For the app to survive, somebody has to want a chatbot platform that settled five teen mental-health lawsuits in January and has faced more claims from families and US states since.

In the Hacker News thread, commenters brought up 23andMe and Spirit Airlines, two companies whose data went up for sale once they went under. "Privacy Policy unchanged" describes today. It doesn't tell you what a buyer gets to do with your logs after the sale closes.

How to export your Character.ai data with the official request

Do this first. It takes two minutes. Character.ai's own help center returned a 403 when I tried to load it, so these paths come from third-party guides, and the guides don't agree with each other. Menu names may have moved.

On the web:

1. Sign in at character.ai.
2. Open Profile Settings, then Account, then Manage Account & Data.
3. Pick the export data option.

In the mobile app, look for Export my data in account settings (one guide puts it under Settings → Privacy, another under Legal & Privacy). The official update says export works from both the app and the website, though one guide claims the desktop site doesn't have the option. If you can't find it on the web, use the phone.

Things to know before you rely on it:

• There's no per-chat export. You get one archive of the whole account (LLMnesia's guide).
• It's a snapshot. Anything you chat after you request it isn't included, so request it again right before you stop using the service.
• Delivery reportedly goes to email. One guide says the download link arrives by email, expires (it guesses 24 to 48 hours), and can take anywhere from about an hour to a few days to show up. It also says the ZIP has a folder named after your username with a data/ subfolder holding user.json, character.json and message.json. I haven't seen Character.ai confirm that file list. Open the archive and check for yourself.
• Don't spam the button. That same guide says every request queues separately. Assume everyone else read the same headline and is in that queue with you.

The archive is raw JSON. You can grep it, but it won't load straight into another app.

Export characters and chats with CAI Tools (read the permissions first)

To get something another app can import, most people will reach for CAI Tools. SillyTavern's own docs point to it for importing Character.ai chats and bots. According to its Firefox listing, it downloads chats in a "readable" or a "transferable" format and downloads characters as cards. The Chrome listing says JSON and PNG cards, and PNG cards are what SillyTavern imports.

This is what you're agreeing to when you install it, going by the public listings:

The GitHub repo says outright: "Code here is not up-to-date." It exists for bug reports. You can't audit the build you install against that source.

So you'd be giving a closed-source extension your logged-in character.ai session, in the same tab as your most private conversations. I still think it's the right call, because nothing else gets your data out in a format another app can load. Just be careful about it:

• Install it in a separate browser profile that's only logged into Character.ai.
• Export everything in one sitting, then uninstall it.
• If you're paranoid (fair), log out of every session afterwards and change your password.
• Lots of similarly named "Character.ai Exporter" extensions are going to show up in the stores this month. Don't install any of them unless you can explain who wrote it.

Also open every exported character card and look at the definition field. If it comes out empty, you've saved a name, an avatar and a greeting, and nothing else.

Run your Character.ai characters locally with SillyTavern and Ollama

Once your characters are PNG cards and your chats are files on disk, you don't need Character.ai's servers anymore. The local setup takes about ten minutes.

Step 1 is installing Ollama and pulling a model. On Linux:

curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh
ollama pull llama3.1:8b

Choose a model that fits your RAM or VRAM. The Ollama library has plenty, and roleplay quality is a matter of taste, so try a few.

Step 2 is raising the context window, which matters more than which model you pick. The Ollama FAQ says "By default, Ollama uses a context window size of 4096 tokens." A character definition plus a long chat history will blow through that, and the character will start forgetting who it is. The FAQ's example raises it server-wide:

OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=8192 ollama serve

One catch on Linux: the install script already runs Ollama as a systemd service, so that command will fail with "address already in use". Put the variable in the service instead:

sudo systemctl edit ollama
# add under [Service]:
#   Environment="OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=8192"
sudo systemctl restart ollama

Ollama binds to 127.0.0.1:11434 by default. Leave it there. The FAQ shows how to set OLLAMA_HOST to 0.0.0.0:11434 to expose it on your network, and if you do that, anyone on the network can talk to the server.

Step 3 is SillyTavern, from the release branch:

git clone https://github.com/SillyTavern/SillyTavern -b release
cd SillyTavern
./start.sh

You'll need git and Node.js installed first. It opens in your browser, by default at http://127.0.0.1:8000.

Step 4: connect the two. In the API connections panel, choose Text Completion, set the API type to Ollama, and enter http://127.0.0.1:11434. Then pick your model from the dropdown.

Step 5: import. Import the PNG card from the character list first, because a chat has to belong to a character. Then open that character, open Manage chat files from the options menu at the bottom left, use the import button there, and pick the exported chat file.

After that, your characters live in a folder you can back up with rsync, put in git, or copy to a USB stick.

Character.ai export checklist

1. Request the official export now. Request it again before you leave.
2. Download the email link as soon as it arrives.
3. Export cards and chats with CAI Tools in a separate browser profile, then uninstall it.
4. Check that every card actually contains a definition.
5. Set up SillyTavern + Ollama and import one character to prove the pipeline works.
6. Decide whether to delete your account before the sale closes. You've got your copy. Whether the buyer also gets one is up to you.

A local 8B model is worse than what Character.ai ran at its peak. I'll take that trade over having my chat logs listed as an asset in a Delaware court.

So which is it for you: would you trust another hosted AI companion app after this, or is local the only safe option now? And if you're staying hosted, what would a company have to promise you about data in a bankruptcy before you'd sign up?

Sources

• An update on Character.ai (official announcement)
• Hacker News discussion
• The Next Web: Character.AI files for bankruptcy as Disney bids $20M
• CAI Tools on Firefox Add-ons and GitHub
• SillyTavern docs: chat file management and Linux/macOS install
• Ollama FAQ