Sharing More About the Recent Incident

We recently became aware of, and corrected, an incident where certain user information belonging to a small number of users was inadvertently made available to other users for a ten minute window. The trust, safety, and privacy of our community is extremely important to us.  We wanted to share with you what happened and the steps we have taken to address the incident, including introducing additional technical controls.

During an attempt to refresh the list of featured Characters on our homepage, we mistakenly triggered a change that temporarily made parts of these users’ account pages – which, depending on the user, could include a username, name, bio, Characters, homepage, personas, voices or chats – publicly visible. Our investigation found, in most instances, only a single section of an affected user’s account was visible to others. With regard to chat content, our investigation has determined that the majority of affected users had just the first page of a chat with a single Character visible to others.

This issue persisted for approximately ten minutes, as our team was able to quickly identify the cause and make the necessary adjustments to fix it. Overall, less than 0.01% of our users had any information visible during this brief window. 

We have taken steps to implement additional safeguards that will help prevent this type of issue from recurring.  We are revising our process for making changes to critical infrastructure, including implementing additional technical controls to ensure all changes meet our standard for quality. 

Character.AI values the trust our users place in us to keep their information private and safe.  Every team member takes that responsibility seriously and, while an accident, this incident was a failure of that trust. We are truly sorry and will take every possible precaution to ensure this doesn’t happen again.