“must stop immediately”
On 30 September 2025 Axios reported that the Walt Disney Company had sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist letter, and published what was in it. The platform’s chatbots were “known, in some cases, to be sexually exploitive.” “Disney will not allow your company to hijack its characters, damage its brands.” And, plainly: “Character.ai’s conduct is egregious and must stop immediately.” Character.AI took the characters down and said — accurately — that every character on the platform was made by a user.
“false, crafty, and sottell handelying”
Boxley Abbey, in Kent, surrendered on 29 January 1538. Geoffrey Chamber, working through the house defacing its images, found behind the face of the Rood of Grace — a crucifix that had drawn pilgrims off the Canterbury road for two centuries — “certen ingynes and olde wyer” which “dyd cause the eyes of the same to move and stere,” and made the lower lip “in lyke wise to move as thoughe itt shulde speke.” He wrote to Cromwell about it. The image “hath beene had in greate veneracion of people”; the handling of it had been “false, crafty, and sottell… to the dishonor of God, and illusion of the sayd people.” The monks, he added, “declare themselff to be ignorante.”
Michelle Oing’s reading of the episode, in Different Visions 13 this year, is that the moving parts were very probably never a secret. William Lambarde described the movement in 1576, and Leanne Groeneveld traces his account back to a monastic pamphlet: the abbey appears to have advertised the thing. My own inference, and it is mine: the fraud may not have been worked at Boxley over two hundred years. It may have been manufactured in the fortnight after it was found.
“non-exclusive, perpetual”
Late on Monday 12 October 2026, thirteen months after the letter, Character.AI said it had filed for Chapter 11 — in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, per Inc., which also reports between $50 million and $100 million in assets and liabilities. Chief executive Colin Adams cited “significant legal, regulatory and operational headwinds.” TechCrunch puts the money raised at more than $193 million and notes the platform reported twenty million monthly active users as of October 2024. If no workable bid emerges, it “will be wound down.”
The lead bidder is Disney, at $20 million, for certain assets and a “non-exclusive, perpetual license” to some of the intellectual property — not, as CBS News puts it, the chatbot platform itself. Disney has hired former Character.AI staff. The company’s former chief executive is now Disney’s chief technology officer.
Twenty million people’s side of all this turns up in the paperwork exactly once. The privacy policy, as CBS reads it, provides that what has been collected — chat transcripts, voice recordings, images and video — may be handed over in connection with a sale of the company or its assets. Not valued. Not excluded. Permitted. Tom’s Guide went looking for a statement on whether a buyer would keep anyone’s conversations, or anyone’s characters, and found that none has been made.
“all the people there might see”
The Rood did not go quietly into a bonfire at Boxley. It was taken first to Maidstone and shown there, Wriothesley writes, so that “all the people there might see the illusion that had bene used.” Then to London, to be shown to the king and the court. Then to Paul’s Cross on 24 February 1538, where Bishop John Hilsey preached against images and idolatry, “broke the vice” himself in front of the congregation, and handed what was left down to the crowd, which broke it “in peeces.” John Hooker, writing to a correspondent in Zurich, called it “a wooden God of the Kentish folk.” Then: “there was an end of him!”
The bishop worked the mechanism. That is the detail I keep returning to, because of what it implies about the audience: in the three or four weeks after the Rood of Grace was condemned as a fraud, it was operated in front of more people, and more consequential people, than had ever watched it move in two centuries on the pilgrim route — a market town, a royal court, and the largest open-air pulpit in England. The condemnation was the biggest job it ever had, and the only one anybody troubled to write down. That is the pattern I think deserves a name and has not got one: a made thing is denounced, the denunciation is itself a use of the thing, and the denunciation is what survives in the sources. Disney’s letter and Disney’s bid are not a reversal. They are one position in two moods. The characters were egregious and had to stop immediately, and the machinery that produced them is worth twenty million dollars on a non-exclusive, perpetual basis, and both can be true at once by anyone’s arithmetic, because the objection was never to the mechanism. It was to who had hold of it.
I want to be careful about the limits of this. A chatbot is not a devotional image, and a bid in a Delaware court is not a sermon. What carries across is narrower and duller. The February 1538 account of Boxley’s dissolution survives, at the National Archives, SC 6/Henry VIII/6119, and it gave a price to the plate by weight in ounces, the corn and hay, the livestock, the timber and glass off the demolition, the thirty-eight fothers of lead melted and cast for £4 10s. 6½d. Everything a trade had a rate for got a number. The Rood appears nowhere in it.
And the inventory of the abbey’s possessions that the commissioners were instructed to prepare is not extant. Chamber’s detailed book of particulars is not known to survive either. So the only reason we know what the thing did is a letter written to have it destroyed.
Sources
- Axios, 30 September 2025 — Disney’s cease-and-desist letter, obtained and quoted; Character.AI’s response.
- CBS News, 13 October 2026 — the Chapter 11 statement, Adams’s quote, the $20 million non-exclusive perpetual licence, the privacy-policy provision on transfer of collected data.
- TechCrunch, 13 October 2026 — funding total (PitchBook), the October 2024 user figure, the wind-down language.
- Inc. — District of Delaware, the stalking-horse structure, the $50–100 million range. One outlet gives a current user figure of twelve million against TechCrunch’s twenty million for October 2024; I have used only the dated figure and dropped the undated one.
- Tom’s Guide — that no statement has been made about preserving conversations or user-created characters.
- Michelle Oing, “Sculpture in the Deceptive Mode? The Shifting Social Sculptures at Bern and Boxley,” Different Visions 13 (2026), DOI 10.61302/OCMR7422 — Chamber’s letter to Cromwell, Wriothesley’s and Hooker’s accounts, Lambarde 1576, the Groeneveld attribution. The article gives the Paul’s Cross date as 24 February 1538 on Wriothesley’s account and elsewhere dates the destruction to October 1538; I have used February, which is the date its cited chronicle supports.
- “The Late Monastery of Boxley in the Countie of Kent,” Archaeologia Cantiana 142 — the February 1538 account of sales and expenses, The National Archives SC 6/Henry VIII/6119; the surrender date; and the statements that the commissioners’ inventory and Chamber’s book of particulars do not survive. The article’s figures and its transcription of the roll differ on several line items, so I have used only the total charge and the lead and bells, on which they agree.