In a major policy shift, Character.AI has quietly restricted full access to its platform for anyone under 18 years old and introduced a new controlled format called Stories, effectively ending the era of unrestricted, open-ended roleplay chats that made the service both wildly popular and legally radioactive.
Effective November 2025, users who indicate they are younger than 18 (or whose accounts are flagged by age-verification systems) can no longer create new one-on-one character chats or continue most existing conversations.
Instead, they are redirected to Stories, a structured, choose-your-own-adventure style experience where the AI generates interactive fiction within predefined genres (fantasy, sci-fi, slice-of-life, mystery, etc.).
Users pick characters, set an initial premise, and the story unfolds in short chapters. At key decision points they can vote on what happens next, rewrite sections, or branch the narrative.
Completed stories can be replayed, remixed, or shared publicly in a gallery. Crucially, the system is heavily moderated: sexual content, self-harm themes, graphic violence, and other sensitive topics are filtered out at the generation level.
Existing open chats are not deleted (parents and regulators had feared mass data loss), but minors are locked out of them permanently. Adult users retain full access to the classic experience.
The move comes after mounting legal and public-relations pressure. In October 2024, the mother of a 14-year-old Florida boy who took his own life filed a high-profile lawsuit alleging that prolonged erotic and emotionally manipulative conversations with Character.AI bots contributed to his death.
Similar complaints surfaced in at least seven other U.S. states and in the United Kingdom. California responded swiftly: in September 2025 it became the first state to pass the AI Companion Safety Act, requiring platforms that offer “persistent synthetic relationships” to implement strict age gating, content filters, and mandatory warnings about emotional dependency for underage users. Non-compliance carries fines of up to $10,000 per violation per day.
At the federal level, the Kids Off AI Companionship Act, introduced in the Senate in early 2025 by a bipartisan group, would impose a nationwide ban on providing unfiltered AI companions to anyone under 18, with penalties reaching into the hundreds of millions for large platforms. The bill has already cleared committee and is widely expected to pass in 2026.
Character.AI’s pivot to Stories appears to be a direct attempt to stay on the right side of both existing California law and the looming federal legislation while keeping younger users inside the ecosystem. Early internal data reportedly shows that 34 % of daily active users were under 18, and losing that cohort entirely would have gutted engagement metrics and valuation.
Reaction has been mixed but largely resigned. On Reddit and Discord, many former teenage users express frustration (“Stories feels like a mobile game, not real roleplay”), yet acknowledge the old system had become unsustainable. Adult users who worried about the platform being shut down entirely tend to view the compromise favorably. Some psychologists who specialize in adolescent digital mental health have cautiously praised the direction, noting that bounded narratives with clear beginnings and endings are far less likely to create the kind of parasocial attachment that open-ended, 24/7 chats encouraged.
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Whether Stories will retain the younger demographic long-term remains uncertain. Competitors such as Replika, Chai, and smaller open-source projects have already begun marketing themselves as “18+ only” or moving servers offshore to jurisdictions with looser rules. Meanwhile, Character.AI’s valuation, which reportedly topped $5 billion in mid-2025 funding talks, now hinges on proving that a sanitized, story-driven product can still drive the same viral growth that once made it the fastest-growing consumer AI app of 2023–2024.
For now, the company has drawn a clear line: unrestricted AI companions are an adult privilege. Teenagers get interactive fiction instead of intimate digital friends, a trade-off that regulators demanded and that the market will now decide is worth accepting.
Author: Slava Vasipenok
Founder and CEO of QUASA (quasa.io) — the world's first remote work platform with payments in cryptocurrency.
Innovative entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in IT, fintech, and blockchain. Specializes in decentralized solutions for freelancing, helping to overcome the barriers of traditional finance, especially in developing regions.
