TechPulse USA

By TechPulse USA · 18 October 2026 Photo: Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World. Disney expects to spend $180 million over three years hiring 66 staff from bankrupt chatbot startup Character.AI. Credit: Katie Rommel-Esham / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Disney has put a price on the AI talent war, and the number is so lopsided it reads like a typo. In a Delaware bankruptcy filing this week, the entertainment giant disclosed that it expects to spend $180 million over three years on compensation and retention for 66 employees hired away from Character.AI — the chatbot startup it once accused of stealing its characters. For the technology those same people built, Disney offered $20 million. Do the division and the message is blunt: to Disney, the engineers are worth nine times the code. The twist nobody should miss? Two weeks before signing off on those cheques, Disney laid off several hundred of its own people, including tech staff. The $180 million payroll, explained The fig...

Update, Oct. 21: Disney didn't just bid — it engineered the bankruptcy The $20M bid now looks less like a rescue and more like the plan. Court filings reviewed by Wired (via the Times of India, Oct 19) show Disney required its Character.AI deal to be completed through Chapter 11 proceedings: Disney paid Character.AI $5.5 million in September plus a $2 million refundable deposit, and in a $180-million hiring spree took most of the startup's staff — including then-CEO Karandeep Anand, who became Disney's first company-wide CTO (named September 18, started October 2). Disney has offered jobs to at least 60–66 employees, with about $60 million a year in compensation plus a $30 million retention pool — roughly $180 million over three years — and the vast majority have accepted (bidding-procedures motion filed Oct 13 in the Delaware bankruptcy court, via AdGully; TechCrunch first reported the offers Oct 18). The $20 million stalking-horse bid is for a non-exclusive, perpetual ...

Published 13 October 2026 Photo: Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom. Disney, which sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist letter last year, is now the stalking-horse bidder for its intellectual property. Credit: Jedi94, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Character.AI filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday, and the company waiting to buy its bones is the one that tried to kill it. Disney Worldwide Services has put down $20 million as the stalking-horse bidder for the chatbot startup's intellectual property — the same Disney that sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist letter thirteen months ago over unauthorised bots of Elsa, Moana, Peter Parker and Darth Vader, then hired its chief executive as Disney's first-ever corporate CTO. If the court-supervised sale doesn't produce a buyer willing to keep the platform running, the company's own press release says the platform "will be wound down." Two years ago, Google paid about $2.7 bi...