Character.AI and Replika: the restrictions, dated

In February 2023 Replika removed erotic roleplay days after an Italian regulator ordered it to stop processing Italian users' data. In November 2024 Character.AI began deleting characters in bulk. Neither company announced the change to the people it affected first, and in both cases users found out by opening the app.

Read separately, each looks like one company's decision. Read together, they are the same sequence: an outside force applies pressure, the platform removes a capability rather than defending it, and the people who had built something on that capability absorb the loss. Three different outside forces appear below, a data protection authority, a wrongful death suit, and a rights holder, and the platform response is identical each time.

What follows is the record in one place, with the date each change was announced or reported and a link to where it was said. Nothing appears here that we could not read for ourselves on 7 September 2026.

On the 2024 removals, Character.AI said it conducts “proactive detection and moderation of user-created Characters, including using industry-standard and custom blocklists that are regularly updated,” and that it adheres to DMCA requirements. The same statement confirmed removed characters would be “added to our custom blocklists moving forward,” which is the sentence that made those deletions permanent rather than temporary.

On the under-18 change, the company wrote that it would “build an under-18 experience that still gives our teen users ways to be creative – for example, by creating videos, stories, and streams with Characters.” On verification it said it had “built an age assurance model in-house” and would combine it “with leading third-party tools including Persona.”

On the 2026 wave, the framing shifted from enforcement to licensing: the company cited ongoing IP-related complaints and said it wants to work with rights holders to bring characters to the platform officially.

The reporting on both deletion waves is largely a record of people finding out after the fact. Some removed characters had thousands, and in a few cases millions, of user chats behind them. In February 2026 one user wrote “All of my House bots are gone again. I WAS VERY INVESTED IN EVERY SINGLE ONE” in capitals, and a post titled simply “Sad day” showing characters flagged as Moderated collected more than 160 upvotes.

Users named the February event the Moderatedpocalypse. Some observed that previously removed characters briefly reappeared in late December before disappearing again, which is the kind of detail that only shows up when the people affected are the ones keeping the record.

It is tempting to read this as a single crackdown, and it is not. Three entirely different outside forces appear in the record above, and they arrive through three different doors.

A REGULATOR. Italy's data protection authority reached Replika through privacy law, not content law. The order was about processing the data of Italian users, and the reasoning was that children were exposed and nobody was screening for them. Replika's answer was to remove erotic roleplay for everyone, which is a content change made in response to a data ruling.

A COURT. Garcia v. Character Technologies was filed in October 2024 and settled in January 2026, and in between Character.AI ended open-ended chat for under-18s. We are not claiming the announcement was caused by the litigation, because no filing or statement we could read says so. We are noting that a company facing a wrongful death claim which alleged no protections for minors announced, thirteen months later, protections for minors.

A RIGHTS HOLDER. The 2024 and 2026 deletions are copyright enforcement and have nothing to do with either of the above. The company has been explicit that it would rather license characters than remove them, which is a commercial position rather than a safety one.

The response is the same in all three cases. Not a narrower rule, not an age-gated tier, not a warning: removal, applied to everyone, discovered afterwards. That is the finding worth taking from this page, and it is the reason the two stories belong on one timeline.

We do not know how many characters were removed in either wave. No total has been published, and the reporting describes the pattern rather than counting it. We do not know how many original characters were caught as false positives, or how many appeals succeeded.

We are also not claiming this is the complete list. It is the list of changes we could trace to a source we could read on 7 September 2026. Enforcement that was never announced would not appear here, and by definition we would not know about it.

Character.AI's own policy and community guidelines announcement in its help centre returned HTTP 403 to our request on 7 September 2026, so we have not summarised it. Several sites publish accounts of 2026 changes involving metered free-tier features and face-scan age verification. We could not reach a primary source for those, so they are absent from the table rather than repeated on trust.

Secondary accounts also describe Replika restoring a legacy version in March 2023 for accounts created before 1 February, and attribute an opt-in rate to its chief executive. Our source for the February events was published on 21 February 2023 and therefore cannot confirm anything in March. We have left the restoration out for that reason, and it is the row we would most like to add.

Two academic and legal sources we tried were paywalled or blocked: a peer-reviewed study of the Replika user reaction, and a Courthouse News report of the First Amendment ruling. Neither is quoted here.

If you can point us at a primary source for any of it, we will add the row and date it.