On October 12, 2026, Character Technologies, the company behind Character.AI, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The platform still runs for now, but the company says the court-supervised sale must finish by late November or early December 2026, and the service could be wound down if no buyer keeps it going. If you have months or years of chats there, back them up now.

Start with the official export while the service is fully working. On the web, open your Profile, click Profile Settings, go to Account, then Manage Account and Data, and select Export Data. In the mobile app, the path is Profile, the settings icon, then Legal and Privacy, then Export Data. The export arrives as an archive and can take three to four weeks.

Watch the timing carefully. Once Character.AI emails you the download link, it stays valid for only seven days, so grab the file as soon as it arrives. Open the archive and confirm that the conversations you care about are actually inside it. An export you never open is a backup you cannot trust.

Do not rely on the official export alone. Manually save your most important chats today: open each conversation in a browser, scroll to the top so every message loads, then copy it into a document, one file per character. For shorter chats, screenshots work. A free community-made extension for Chrome and Firefox, CAI Tools, can download chats in readable form too, though it is not made by Character.AI.

Save your character definitions separately, because plain text is the most portable backup you can make. For every character you created or love, copy the name, tagline, greeting, first message, description, definition, and any example dialogue into a note, and save the avatar image from the character's page. These few fields are everything you need to recreate the character elsewhere, and good character definitions are really just good prompting.

Finally, review your subscription and privacy. Billing is unchanged for now, but cancel from your account settings if you stop using the app, and remember that deleting your account is permanent. Consider deleting chats after your export lands. Keep watching the company's announcements into late November — and if the platform winds down, moving to another service from a real backup is far easier than starting from nothing.