Karandeep Anand, who becomes Disney’s chief technology officer on 2 October
Disney has named Karandeep Anand, until now the chief executive of Character.AI, to the newly created role of chief technology officer for the whole company. Disney sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist letter in September 2025 over unauthorised use of its characters, and the company barred under-18s from open-ended chat two months later.
Disney has named Karandeep Anand to the newly created role of chief technology officer for the whole company, Bloomberg reported. He was until now the chief executive of Character.AI. Disney has had technology chiefs for its business units, never one across the group.
He came to Character.AI from the fintech Brex, and before that ran ads and business products at Facebook and spent 15 years at Microsoft. He starts on 2 October. Disney sent his last employer a legal letter last year.
In September 2025 it demanded Character.AI stop using its characters, saying the service was “filled with chatbots” impersonating them, and that those bots were “in some cases, sexually exploitive and otherwise harmful and dangerous to children”. Character.AI removed them within days.
Anand was running the company at the time.
A month later it went further, barring under-18s from open-ended chat from 25 November 2025. That followed a lawsuit over the death of a 14-year-old in Florida whose mother said the design was addictive and manipulative. Minors kept access to earlier conversations and to image and video tools.
Disney has now hired the man who made that call, and expects some of his technical team to follow him.
The job is broad. Josh D’Amaro, Disney’s new chief executive, wants Disney+ to carry games and other experiences alongside films and television, and the company is already testing AI search on Disney+ and ESPN. Anand will report to him directly.
That puts a chatbot executive in charge of technology at a children’s brand.
Europe spent this week proposing rules for that exact overlap. The Commission’s Kids Act would ban social media for under-13s, cap 13 and 14-year-olds at an hour a day, and switch AI chatbots off by default for minors.
It also says they must not create emotional dependency.
That is the harm alleged in the Florida case. The proposal still needs the European Parliament and every member state, and carries fines of up to 6% of global annual revenue for the platforms it would cover.
Disney+ operates across Europe.
Nothing about the appointment is improper, and Anand’s record includes tightening a product rather than loosening it. Disney’s own announcement says he made user trust and safety a priority as Character.AI scaled. But the letter it sent less than a year ago remains the sharpest public description of what that company was doing.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
