Disney hires former Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand as its first-ever CTO

Disney creates its first CTO role

Disney has appointed Karandeep Anand as its first-ever chief technology officer, announcing the move on September 18. According to The Verge, Anand will report directly to Josh D'Amaro, the company's recently appointed CEO, and will lead Disney's infrastructure, product, engineering, and data and AI platform teams.

That a conglomerate of Disney's scale has never had a CTO until now is itself part of the story. The creation of the role, and the decision to fill it with an executive from the AI startup world, signals how central technology and AI have become to the company's plans.

A hire from a company Disney once threatened

Anand arrives from Character.AI, a startup founded in 2021 whose platform lets users build generative AI characters and chat with them. According to The Verge, he ran the company as CEO for just over a year and oversaw its push into microdramas.

The history between the two companies makes the appointment unusual. As The Verge notes, about a year before the hire, Disney was sending Character.AI cease-and-desist letters over tools that infringed copyrighted IP. TechCrunch dates that letter to September 2025 and reports that Disney accused the startup of hosting copyrighted characters from its franchises.

Character.AI has faced other legal problems as well. TechCrunch reports the company has also been sued over allegations that its chatbots encouraged users toward self-harm and suicide.

Who Karandeep Anand is

According to TechCrunch, citing Anand's LinkedIn profile, he joined Character.AI as a board adviser before moving into the CEO seat in May 2025. His earlier career includes a stretch at Facebook from 2015 to 2021, preceded by 15 years at Microsoft.

Variety, as cited by TechCrunch, reports that Anand was selected for the role by D'Amaro himself, who became Disney's chief executive after Bob Iger stepped down in March. In TechCrunch's reading, the appointment suggests D'Amaro wants the company to embrace new technologies.

What it signals about Disney's AI plans

The Verge frames the hire as a possible indicator of how Disney intends to pursue AI now that its partnership with OpenAI has unraveled. Rather than relying on an outside AI vendor, bringing in a former AI startup chief and handing him data and AI platforms alongside core engineering suggests Disney may be building more of that capability in-house.

It also marks a striking reversal in posture toward Character.AI specifically. A company that Disney's lawyers treated as an IP threat a year ago is now the source of one of its most senior technology executives.

Why it matters

Disney creating a CTO role for the first time, and staffing it with the former head of an AI chatbot startup, elevates AI from a scattered set of experiments to a top-level corporate function at one of the world's largest media companies. The back story matters too: a media giant that responded to Character.AI with legal threats in 2025 has now absorbed its CEO, hinting that legacy entertainment companies may increasingly choose to acquire AI talent and leadership rather than only litigate against it. With the OpenAI partnership reportedly over and a new CEO in place, this appointment is an early and concrete signal of how D'Amaro's Disney intends to navigate the collision between Hollywood's intellectual property and generative AI — a tension that continues to shape the whole industry.