Heads up, my dear lovers of corporate drama! Character.AI has just made a move that smells like “we need urgent help”. They’ve hired Karandeep Anand as CEO, who until very recently was VP of Business Products at Meta. And here comes the good part: this change arrives at a moment when Character.AI is more burnt out than a phone with a swollen battery.

Let’s see, get me this straight. Character.AI is that platform where you can chat with AI characters that can range from Einstein to your favorite anime. Sounds fun, right? Well, it turns out not everything is as pretty as it seems. The company is mired in a huge legal mess because one of its chatbots supposedly played a role in the death of a 14-year-old kid in Florida. And I ask myself: how the hell did we get to this point?

Seriously? Really seriously? Because it’s one thing for your AI to help you with homework and quite another for it to end up being part of a tragedy. This smells like a bad scam, and Character.AI knows it. That’s why they’ve been adding safety features like crazy over the past few months.

Hold on, hold on, this is getting interesting. Karandeep Anand is no nobody. This guy worked at Microsoft managing products on Azure (which for those who don’t know, is Microsoft’s cloud platform that moves billions), and then he went to Meta where he handled advertising products that reached billions of users. Basically, he knows what it’s like to manage big and complicated things.

But here comes the part that catches my attention most: Anand was already an adviser to Character.AI’s board of directors. In other words, he knew the company’s problems from the inside. And yet he’s still accepted the CEO role. This tells me two things: either he’s very brave or he sees a golden opportunity to fix the disaster.

Don’t tell me the timing of this appointment isn’t wild. Character.AI is in the spotlight over child safety issues, it has a terrifying lawsuit hanging over it, and on top of that, 10 months ago Google took its co-founder and CEO, Noam Shazeer. Basically, the company has been sailing without a captain through turbulent waters.

And here’s what bugs me most: the deal with Google. Turns out when Google took Shazeer, it also signed a “non-exclusive” agreement to use Character.AI’s technology. Non-exclusive? Really? This sounds like “I’ll give you something so you don’t sink entirely, but I’m not going to help you too much either”.

This is crazy, but it makes sense. Google needed Shazeer’s talent for its AI projects, but it didn’t want to take on Character.AI’s legal problems. So it takes the brains of the operation and leaves the company to deal with the mess. Very elegant, Google, very elegant.

Let’s see, tell me this: how is Anand supposed to fix this mess? Because he has to deal with child safety issues, legal lawsuits, federal regulators investigating the Google deal over antitrust concerns, and on top of that he has to make the company grow. Raise your hand if you want that job.

But hey, if anyone can do it, it’s probably this guy. He’s worked at Microsoft and Meta, two companies that know what it’s like to deal with regulators, safety issues and assorted scandals. Plus, he comes from Brex, a fintech startup, so he also knows the startup world.

What worries me most is that Character.AI has millions of users, many of them minors, chatting with AIs that can say anything. And after what happened, it’s clear they need much stricter controls. I hope Anand has a plan, because this can’t be fixed with good intentions alone.

And that’s today’s corporate drama, my dear geeks. Character.AI needs a miracle and they’ve put a former Meta exec in charge. We’ll see if he manages to pull the company out of the hole or if this ends up being another chapter in the series “How AIs Can Screw Everything Up”. See you next time, I’m sure there’ll be more drama.

May technology be with you (but responsibly)!