Is Character.AI safe to use?

What Character.AI collects

Character.AI’s privacy policy, effective July 1, 2026, lists the identifiers you give it (name, email, phone number, username), your date of birth and general location, your interests and settings, and payment details if you subscribe. It also collects everything you submit: chat messages, images and videos you post, character descriptions, and recordings of your voice if you use voice features.

Each visit adds technical data gathered with cookies and similar tools, including your device type, IP address, advertising identifiers, pages viewed and actions taken. The policy says it can also receive data about you from other platforms, for example when you interact with its ads on YouTube, TikTok or Reddit, and that it may draw inferences about your preferences and interests from how you use the service.

The policy asks you not to share sensitive details such as health, religion or sexual orientation, and notes that anything you write about other people is collected too.

Who it shares data with

The policy lets Character.AI disclose information to its affiliates, to vendors that handle storage, payments, analytics, content moderation and marketing, to advertising and analytics providers for tailored advertising, to buyers in a merger or sale, and to authorities in response to a warrant, subpoena or court order. It lists tailored advertising and measuring ad campaigns among the purposes for using your data.

Characters and posts have privacy settings that decide whether they are public or visible only to you; anything made public, such as a character and its description, can be seen by others, and the help center says moderators may review it. A popular public character you created can stay on the service even after you delete your account, so the policy advises leaving personal details out of any character you plan to share.

How long it keeps your data

The policy sets no fixed period. It says data is kept as long as needed for the purposes it was collected for, then deleted or aggregated, and may be kept longer to meet legal obligations, resolve disputes or enforce its agreements. You can delete your account from your profile page, and you can ask for a copy of your data or for deletion through the help center or privacy@character.ai.

When your chats train its models

Character.AI says it keeps some of the content you share to train and improve its models, and that it takes steps to reduce personal information before doing so. Its training-data notice lists text and interaction data from users among its sources.

Its help center describes an “Improve the Model for Everyone” switch for users in the European Economic Area and the UK, under Settings, then Data & Privacy in the app. Turning it off stops new content from training its generative models, but Character.AI says it may still use your data to improve search, recommendations and safety classifiers. Outside those regions, the policy presents opting out as a right that depends on where you live, handled by request.

What changed for teens

Character.AI requires users to be at least 13, or 16 in Europe. In October 2025 it announced it would end open-ended chat for users under 18, and it began removing it on November 24, 2025, starting in the US. Teens keep access to features such as Stories, a guided story format, and the company says under-18 users get a more conservative model, stricter filters and a narrower set of characters.

To decide who counts as under 18, it runs age assurance on every account using login information, activity on the platform and signals from third parties. Someone flagged as under 18 can prove otherwise with a selfie checked by Persona, an identity company, and only then, if needed, an ID that Character.AI says it never sees.

The change followed public pressure. In January 2026, Character.AI and Google agreed to settle several lawsuits from families who said the chatbots harmed their teenagers. In July 2026, Italy’s data protection authority fined the company €158,000 for an inadequate privacy notice and weak protections for minors, and ordered it to make age checks work and set minors’ profiles to private by default. Common Sense Media’s risk assessment says the platform should not be used by anyone under 18.

How to limit what Character.AI keeps

Keep characters you create private unless you mean to share them, and leave your real name, school, workplace and location out of chats and character descriptions. If you are in the EEA or UK, turn off “Improve the Model for Everyone”; elsewhere, send a privacy request asking to opt out. Manage cookies where your browser or region allows, delete your account when you stop using it, and request deletion of your data if you want it gone.

For parents, the safest setting is the one the company and outside reviewers now agree on: open-ended character chat is not for under-18s. A chatbot that stays in character is still a hosted service, and what is typed into it is read by the company that runs it.

How nokeep differs

nokeep needs no account, so there is no name, email, phone number or date of birth to collect. Saved chats live in your browser and nokeep keeps no server copy of them; it does not train on your chats and runs no ads or advertising trackers. The tradeoff is that nothing syncs between devices, and clearing browser data erases your history.

Like Character.AI, nokeep uses hosted models, so a message still has to be processed to be answered, under terms that the provider does not retain it afterwards. Free use covers 25 messages and 2 images a day, plus one short video clip while the daily free supply lasts.