🛡 AI company bankruptcies could expose users' private chats
BBC Future (Thomas Germain, 29.10.2026) examines a lesser-known risk of the "AI bubble": when an AI company goes bankrupt, its personal data databases become an asset that can be sold to third parties. The main case is Character.ai: the company sold part of its assets to Disney for $20 million; user data was not included in the deal, but courts indicated that Character.ai has the right to sell the data to other buyers. According to its privacy policy, the data can be used to train models, build profiles, and run targeted advertising, and in the US, bankruptcy is often explicitly written as an exception to data protection promises. Experts Calli Schroeder from Epic and Professor Melissa Jacoby from UNC Chapel Hill warn that people share more sensitive information with "personified" bots, including details about friends and relatives who never used the service.
🌍 For the industry, AI company bankruptcies turn accumulated personal data into a liquid asset: the buyer receives it along with rights to model training and targeting. This is a systemic privacy risk that is not eliminated by either privacy policies or current US legislation — the dialogue database is legally separable from the service and can be sold separately from other assets.
👤 If you have communicated with AI bots, especially "personified" ones like Character.ai, your messages and even mentions of your loved ones may pass to a new data owner after the company's bankruptcy. Specific step: delete your account and data in services where you shared sensitive information, checking the deletion instructions in their privacy policy.
Source 1: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20261029-the-ai-bubble-could-expose-your-deepest-secrets Source 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50344871