Topic
Conversational AI products built for ongoing personal interaction rather than task completion, often presented as friends, partners or characters.
Character.AI filed for Chapter 11 on October 12 with a $20 million stalking-horse bid from Disney for a non-exclusive license to its AI technology. Google paid about $2.7 billion for a non-exclusive license to its model technology in 2024, 135 times that figure.
Reality
SK Telecom is in talks to sell its entire 7.3% Scatter Lab stake at about 240,000 won a share, more than 70% above cost, sedaily reported. On the 420 billion won valuation, that is about 40 times annualised operating profit.
Reality
Karandeep Anand takes over Disney's technology on 2 October, about a year after Disney's lawyers told the company he ran to strip its characters out of user-made chatbots. Several of his engineers come with him.
Perspective Coverage
7 publishersReality
Governor Gavin Newsom signed 13 child safety bills on 10 September, and the feed rules bar serving under-16s content ranked on their own history and profile. Europe's DSA requires only that a non-profiling option exist.
Perspective Coverage
4 publishersReality
Xicoia made a biometric age estimate mandatory for every Talking Tilly caller this month and cites legitimate interests as the legal basis. The service closes on September 27; transcripts can be held for eight weeks.
Reality
California's new law regulates how a chatbot behaves toward a child, listing the manipulation patterns operators must design out. The statute grades some of those patterns without quantifying them, and how an auditor measures them is the open question.
Reality