Donald Trump has been told to delete the AI generated video where he has put himself in the Yorkshire tiger attack which shows him playing with the animal.
William Chapman died of his injuries at the weekend (10 October) after he climbed into the tiger enclosure at Yorkshire Wildlife Park, he was declared dead at the scene and footage of the incident has been shared online despite police asking people not to do so.
The US president put his own spin on sharing the footage as he posted an AI video of him in Chapman’s place but the tiger plays with him instead of mauling him, and Piers Morgan has told him to take it down.
“This is appallingly tasteless. Delete it, President Donald Trump,” he wrote on social media as he reacted to Trump’s latest actions, joining those who have condemned the decision.
It seems Morgan is an agreement with others who have said it was ‘absolutely disgusting’ for Trump to post an AI mockup of a man’s death and put himself in it.
Piers Morgan has told Trump to delete the AI video (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump had shared the original clip which depicted the tiger attacking Chapman, having captioned it ‘don’t ever mess with nature’, and he has been called a ‘complete disgrace’ for doing so.
Chapman, 23, was hailed by his family as ‘bright, warm and engaging’, with them saying he had ‘suffered significant mental illness’ over the course of several years.
His family asked people to stop sharing ‘deeply offensive’ content of him being attacked by the tiger, saying in a statement yesterday: “The family are utterly devastated by their loss and are struggling to come to terms with what has happened.
“The publication and circulation of deeply offensive media content is causing them severe distress at an exceptionally vulnerable time. We ask people to stop doing this.
“The family are hopeful that the relevant authorities will do their upmost to get to the bottom of why our amazing son did what he did.”
William Chapman’s family have asked people not to share footage of him being attacked by the tiger (Handout)
Yorkshire Wildlife Park remains closed while they work with the authorities as part of their investigation, though they have confirmed that the tiger will not be put down.
Others in the park said they were quickly evacuated, and one said that Chapman had asked someone to take his photo by the enclosure with the tiger in the background.
One woman said that he had been ‘pacing around with his headphones in’ and then ‘climbed up onto the barriers’ before approaching the tiger.
A wallet holding 4,581.94 BTC sent its full balance, worth about $377 million, to five new addresses on Oct. 12 in a single transaction that paid a fee of 732 sats.
The coins arrived in March 2020, when they were worth roughly $40.5 million.
The address received 22 dust deposits since 2020, including 600 sats on Jan. 28, 2025 from a look-alike address matching its first three and last four characters.
A Bitcoin wallet that has held 4,581.94 BTC since March 2020 sent its entire balance to five new addresses on Oct. 12, moving about $377 million in a single transaction, according to blockchain data. The transfer confirmed in block 971,126 at about 18:37 UTC, with Bitcoin trading around $82,350.
Four of the receiving addresses got exactly 1,000 BTC each, and the fifth received 581.94 BTC. The transaction paid a fee of 732 satoshis, the hundred-millionth-of-a-bitcoin units known as sats, or about 60 cents. As of block 971,279 on Oct. 13, none of the five addresses has spent anything, and it is unclear who controls the wallet or where the coins are going.
The wallet received its coins on March 3, 2020, in a transaction that split a 5,081.95 BTC balance three ways, with 250 BTC going to each of two other addresses. At roughly $8,830 per Bitcoin, the 4,581.95 BTC that landed in the wallet was worth about $40.5 million. The value of the Bitcoin has nearly increased by 10X since then.
The wallet is an example of patience. The coins have sat through several market shocks since they arrived, starting with the COVID-19 crisis, which started shortly after the wallet got funded. During that time the stash went from about $40.5 million to about $17.6 million.
Tesla’s suspension of Bitcoin payments and China’s mining crackdown followed in May 2021, tanking the wallet from about $291 million at its April peak to $131 million by June. The Terra, Celsius and FTX collapses in 2022 would have taken the value down to about $71 million, a loss of about $239 million from the November 2021 peak, as the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes also dragged the S&P 500 down about 25% and Bitcoin hit a two-year low.
Trump’s tariff shock cut also crashed the markets. Bitcoin has since fallen 54% from a record $124,728 to $57,735 before recovering to its current price. The wallet’s value dropped from $571.5 million to about $265 million during that dip, but overall, hodling has resulted in almost 10X of net gains since day 1.
BitcoinBTC · USD
$81,989−1.23%
Oct 7Oct 9Oct 11Oct 12Oct 14
$84.2k$83.1k$81.9k$80.7k
24h HighHigh$84,025
24h LowLow$82,294
VolVol$1.3B
Market projectionsOdds by Myriad
→
The address has also collected dust, meaning transfers of a few hundred to a few thousand sats that cost almost nothing to send. Blockchain data shows 22 such deposits between August 2020 and May 2026, ranging from 546 to 6,953 sats, or less than $6 each at current prices. Sixteen arrived in batch transactions that paid out to between 87 and 610 addresses at once.
One deposit matches the pattern of address poisoning, in which an attacker generates an address that copies the first and last characters of a real one, hoping someone later copies it from a transaction history by mistake. On Jan. 28, 2025, an address beginning 18VpNbPc and ending pQ9x sent the wallet 600 sats, and it shares the first three and last four characters with the whale’s address.
The look-alike was funded in a Nov. 12, 2024 transaction that paid out to 1,401 outputs at once, and it was emptied after sending that one payment. Every other sender used a bc1 address, which looks nothing like the wallet’s legacy 18 address.
That said, this is not the first time dormant wallets move their coins. Back in July 2025, an entity moved 80,000 BTC that had sat for 14 years, worth $8.6 billion, the biggest daily movement of coins aged 10 years or more. Ten days later a Satoshi-era wallet sent 40,009 BTC, about $4.7 billion, to Galaxy, which later said it had executed a sale worth roughly $9 billion for a Satoshi-era client.
As of Oct. 13, the original address holds 23,288 sats in leftover dust, about $19, while the five receiving addresses hold the full 4,581.94 BTC.
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
On 26 January 1972, Vesna Vulović would make history as the first person to fall 33,000 feet out of the sky and survive.
An air hostess for Yugoslav Airlines, Vulović was one of 27 onboard a flight from Stockholm to Belgrade when tragedy struck. A bomb, believed to have been placed onboard the aircraft by Croatian nationalists, exploded while the plane was cruising above a village in the north of the Czech Republic.
The aircraft subsequently broke into three pieces before tumbling to the ground near the Czech village of Srbská Kamenice.
While the rest of the aircraft’s crew and passengers either perished in the explosion or impact, Vulović was found alive in the middle of the aisle in the rear section of the aircraft.
Aged just 22 years old, Vulović was severely injured – suffering from a fractured skull, broken legs, broken ribs and a fractured pelvis – and spent months in hospital, but ultimately survived.
Vesna Vulović was not meant to be on board JAT Flight 367 but ended up working due to a scheduling error (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
Vulović is one of just three people, excluding military pilots, to survive a crash in which a plane fell out of the sky.
How did Vesna Vulović survive the JAT Flight 367 crash?
Before you take Vulović’s story as a sign that surviving a plane exploding at 33,000 feet is a typically survivable event, it’s worth noting that the Serbian national was saved by a variety of favourable factors.
According to Vulović’s entry in the Guinness Book of World Records, the explosion had led to her becoming pinned underneath a food trolley, which prevented her from being sucked out of the aircraft.
JAT Flight 367 photographed before the crash (McDonnell Douglas/Wikimedia Commons)
Vulović also suffered from low blood pressure, which caused her to pass out, meaning that she was not at risk of her heart bursting upon impact with the ground.
Additionally, the wreckage landed upon thick snow, cushioning the aircraft upon impact.
Vulović was also found by a villager who happened to have been an army medic in World War II, who was able to administer life-saving first aid.
Forget claims about not breaking a bone meaning you’re guarded by angels, as Vulović clearly had some sort of divine protection that day.
Either that or she was extremely lucky. Especially when you factor in that she wasn’t even meant to have been working that day.
Despite extensive injuries, Vulović would recover and live until 2016 (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
What happened to Vesna Vulović?
After spending 10 days in a coma and being temporarily paralysed from the waist down, Vulović was able to recover. She did however, live with permanent injuries from the crash, walking with a limp due to a twisted spine.
“I was broken, and the doctors put me back together again,” she told the New York Times in 2008, adding: “Nobody ever expected me to live this long.”
After suffering amnesia due to the head injuries she sustained, Vulović never remembered the crash, instead learning about the incident from others.
She later passed away at her home in December 2016, at the age of 66.
Binance will discontinue Binance Pool, Pool Savings, Cloud Mining, Transaction Accelerator and related features at 07:00 UTC on Nov. 10.
Miners must point their hardware to another pool before the cutoff, and Pool Savings users must redeem their positions before the service ends.
The closure follows Binance’s July shutdown of its exchange NFT service and its June push into U.S. stocks and tokenized equities.
Binance will shut down its mining pool and several related services on Nov. 10, the exchange said in an announcement published Tuesday. The closure covers Binance Pool, Pool Savings, Cloud Mining, and Transaction Accelerator, along with Telegram hashrate alerts, email notifications, and the pool’s API.
“As part of our ongoing review of products and services, Binance will discontinue Binance Pool and related services on 2026-11-10,” Binance wrote. “All Binance Pool-related services will be discontinued. Binance Pool will begin disconnecting mining connections, and Binance Mining Pool Stratum URLs and mining endpoints will be disabled. Hashrate submissions and mining shares submitted after this time will no longer be accepted, processed, or credited.”
A mining pool combines the computing power of many miners and splits block rewards among them based on the work each one contributes. Cloud Mining let users buy hashrate, a slice of mining power, without owning any hardware, while Transaction Accelerator helped users push through Bitcoin transactions that were slow to confirm because of low fees or network congestion.
Binance pool launched in April 2020 and ranked ninth among Bitcoin pools at the end of 2025, with about 26 exahashes per second, or 2.3% of the network, according to Hashrate Index. One exahash per second equals a quintillion guesses every second at the puzzle that earns a block.
Image: Hashrate Index
The same report called Binance Pool the last pool still standing from the era when exchanges rushed into mining, with its relevance tied to Binance’s exchange and custody business rather than mining technology.
Seems like Binance, just as Satoshi Nakamoto, wants to move onto other things. The shutdown arrives as Binance expands into traditional finance. On June 1, the exchange opened access to more than 7,000 US stocks and ETFs for customers outside the United States, with zero commission and fractional purchases from $5, according to co-CEO Richard Teng. It also previewed bStocks, a coming feature that lets users mint tokenized versions of the shares they buy on the BNB blockchain.
Quantmap co-founder Ivan Patriki told Decrypt at the time that large exchanges are moving into equities because they no longer want to depend on crypto market cycles. Vytautas Mackonis, COO of RWA protocol ALCUM, told Decrypt the offering is more structurally complex than it appears, with Binance as the interface, Nest Trading as the broker-dealer, and Alpaca Securities as the custodian.
BitcoinBTC · USD
$81,952−1.27%
Oct 7Oct 9Oct 11Oct 12Oct 14
$84.2k$83.1k$81.9k$80.7k
24h HighHigh$84,025
24h LowLow$82,294
VolVol$1.3B
Market projectionsOdds by Myriad
→
Binance also closed its centralized NFT service on July 3, telling users to move their tokens to Binance Wallet, its self-custody wallet. Then-CEO Changpeng Zhao used the phrase “smooth sunsetting of old products” in 2023.
At 07:00 UTC on Nov. 10, Binance Pool will begin disconnecting miners and disable its Stratum URLs, the server addresses miners point their machines at to connect to the pool. Shares, the proofs of work that determine each miner’s payout, will stop being credited after that time, while those submitted earlier count toward final rewards. Binance said eligible outstanding rewards, balances and refunds will be processed afterward, subject to its product rules, account status and compliance checks.
Miners must point their hardware to another pool before the cutoff, and Pool Savings users need to unsubscribe or redeem their positions before the service ends. Binance said the pool will keep operating normally until the cutoff. Anyone expecting a final payout has until 23:59 UTC on Nov. 10 to finish any required identity verification. Binance Pool pages will stay viewable until 07:00 UTC on Nov. 24, after which they become permanently inaccessible.
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
“Where’s Wanda?” Apple TV’s first German series, proved a major hit for the streamer. The show’s creative team at UFA Fiction have now raised the stakes with Season 2.
Set in the town of Sundersheim, the series’ first season followed parents Carlotta (Heike Makatsch) and Dedo (Axel Stein) Klatt on their desperate search for their missing daughter (Lea Drinda), with the help of tech-savvy son Ole (Leo Simon).
Obtaining gear from the darknet, they spy on their neighbors and local residents, uncovering in the process many of the town’s hidden secrets.
Wanda was finally found at the end of Season 1. But, found standing over a dead body, Wanda ends up behind bars in Season 2.
“Where’s Wanda?” Season 2 was created, written and executive produced by Oliver Lansley, whose credits include the Anna Paquin drama “Flack,” alongside award-winning executive producer and UFA Fiction managing director Nataly Kudiabor (“Arthur’s Law”) and Oliver Ossege (“Helgoland 513”). The series was co-created and based on a story by Zoltan Spirandelli (“Vaya con Dios”) and is directed by Tobi Baumann (“Faking Hitler”) and Christian Ditter (“How To Be Single”).
Speaking to Variety about the success of “Where’s Wanda?” Kudiabor discusses the hit show’s popularity, the challenges of maintaining momentum and an ensemble cast that boasts some of Germany’s top acting talent.
Season 2 picks up at “a fantastic starting point,” Kudiabor notes. Without revealing spoilers, it’s suffice to say a major plot twist at the end of Season 1 “opened up a whole new set of possibilities.”
“Wanda’s parents Carlotta and Dedo are once again desperately trying to protect their daughter, this time by proving her innocence and finding the real killer. Meanwhile, Wanda finds herself in prison, where she encounters some familiar enemies and faces threats of her own.
“So, while we’re telling an entirely new story, we’re staying true to the emotional heart of the series: just how far would you go to save your child?”
It was that concept that propelled Season 1 and made Apple TV’s first German-language series a solid hit. “For us, the priority was always to tell a compelling story that would connect with audiences, regardless of where they live,” Kudiabor stresses. The question of how far parents would go to save their child is a universal one, she adds.
“We were delighted that Apple TV shared our belief that this was a theme with strong international appeal.
“At the same time,” she adds, “it was very important to us that the show retain its distinctly German identity. This was also something our co-creators Zoltan Spirandelli and Oliver Lansley felt strongly about. Even though Sundersheim is a heightened, somewhat absurd version of a German small town, we wanted audiences to feel that this story is genuinely rooted in Germany.
“I believe that authenticity is actually what helps a story travel internationally. You don’t have to make something less local to make it more universal.”
Identifying the key elements that have contributed to the show’s success, Kudiabor says: “I think our secret ingredient is dark comedy. Alongside a genuinely gripping and emotionally grounded crime story, humor has always been an essential part of the DNA of the show: particularly for our writer and creator, Oliver Lansley.
“Oliver has an extraordinary ability to balance real emotions and very human problems with increasingly absurd and sometimes outrageous situations. You find yourself laughing at moments when you probably shouldn’t, while still being completely invested in the characters and their struggles.”
It’s precisely that balance that gives the show “its distinctive tone and sets it apart from other crime and mystery shows,” she adds.
Another element that has made the show so appealing is its star-studded cast. This season Sam Riley (“Mint”), Alexandra Maria Lara (“All Those Things We Never Said”) and David Schütter (“Barbarians”) join the series.
Returning cast members include Nikeata Thompson (“Späti”); Harriet Herbig-Matten (“Maxton Hall: The World Between Us”); Gisa Flake (“Berlin Station”); Palina Rojinski (“Welcome to Germany”); Suzanne von Borsody (“Run Lola Run”); Kostja Ullmann (“A Most Wanted Man”); Devid Striesow (“All Quiet on the Western Front”); Frederic Balonier (“Maxton Hall: The World Between Us”); Sascha Geršak (“Murder Mindfully”); Torben Liebrecht (“Altered Carbon”); Aaron Maldonado-Morales (“Sun and Concrete”); and Anton Dreger (“Two Sides of the Abyss”).
“We’re incredibly fortunate to have such a brilliant ensemble from Season 1, and we’re thrilled to welcome some fantastic new actors for the second season,” Kudiabor says.
“For us, it’s a huge compliment when actors of this caliber tell us they loved the first season, really connect with the scripts and are excited to become part of the show.”
“Having Alexandra Maria Lara and Sam Riley — who are married in real life — playing the mysterious new neighbors of Carlotta and Dedo, portrayed so wonderfully by Heike Makatsch and Axel Stein, is a real gift. Their characters arrive in Sundersheim with a big secret of their own, adding another intriguing layer to the story.
Kudiabor stresses that “bringing together such an exceptional cast, including familiar faces in unexpected roles, creates a real sense of excitement and curiosity for the audience.”
Looking beyond Season 2, Kudiabor teases the possibility of future adventures.
“Let’s just say that Oliver Lansley and all of us still have a few tricks up our sleeves when it comes to the future of the Klatt family. But for now, we’re very much looking forward to sharing Season 2 with audiences when it premieres on Apple TV on Oct. 21.”
The resurfaced theory that giant coconut crabs ate Amelia Earhart is linked to the idea that she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, survived an emergency landing on the uninhabited Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro Island in July 1937.
Coconut crabs are the world’s largest land-living arthropods and crustaceans, with leg spans up to 3 feet, weighing over 4 kg and a massive pinch force capable of cracking open coconuts.
Proponents of the theory suggest that if Earhart and Noonan landed on Nikumaroro, they may have died on the island, and the local population of aggressive, carnivorous coconut crabs dragged and scavenged their remains.
In 1940, a British officer discovered 13 human bones on Nikumaroro, which were later lost, along with a makeshift campsite, American-made artifacts and a section of a shoe.
‘Nikumaroro is the final resting place of Earhart’
Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan shared a professional relationship as pilot and navigator (Bettmann)
It comes after a 2018 experiment using pig carcasses demonstrated that coconut crabs could strip a body’s flesh and scatter bones within a couple of weeks.
As of 2014, NASA notes that ‘for decades, forensic scientists, historians, and aviation aficionados have searched for evidence that Earhart landed the Lockheed Electra 10E on Nikumaroro’.
“British colonists in the late 1930s found human bones, a woman’s shoe, airplane parts, bottles of cosmetics, and a box that once contained a sextant (for navigation), among other items,” the space agency said.
The crabs have a massive pinch force capable of cracking open coconuts (Getty Stock Images)
“Later explorations have turned up evidence of campfires and of shells and fish, turtle, and bird bones that appeared to have been eaten.”
While the latest evidence suggests that ‘Nikumaroro is the final resting place of Earhart’, a Purdue University team is actively conducting a new investigation.
The 17-member expedition crew arrived at the remote Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro Island on Monday and have started setting up their staging operations.
‘It is incredibly rewarding to be this close’
A Purdue University team is investigating a satellite-detected object on Nikumaroro Island (Bettmann)
The team is on the island for five days to investigate the ‘Taraia Object’, an anomaly sitting in a shallow reef lagoon.
It was first spotted in satellite imagery in 2020, and historical researchers later confirmed it was also visible in aerial photographs dating as far back as 1938 – just one year after Earhart vanished.
Scientists are using specialized equipment, including sonar and magnetometers, to determine if this object is the submerged wreckage of Earhart’s missing Lockheed Electra 10-E aircraft.
“It is incredibly rewarding to be this close to completing our inspection of the Taraia Object and potentially solving, at long last, the outstanding mystery of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan more than 89 years ago,” said Rick Pettigrew, executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI) and leader of the expedition.
“You can see very clearly where the buys are on Cardano,” Sheldon said, adding that the market will start turning green again once the current phase ends.
His outlook comes as Cardano trades at $0.2346, according to CoinMarketCap data. $ADA has fallen 7.81% over the past week but remains up approximately 11% over the past month.
Sheldon Expects Cardano to Turn Green Within 10 Days
Sheldon expects the current market weakness to persist briefly before buyers regain control. He indicated that the recovery will arrive sooner if the market moves lower and reaches the buying zones he has identified.
“If things play out right, we should be done in the next seven to 10 days and we should be seeing green again,” he said.
The analyst added that a quicker move into these zones will accelerate the recovery. However, he did not provide specific price targets for $ADA or identify exact price levels for the buying areas in the available excerpt.
His comments suggest he sees the current decline as an accumulation phase rather than the start of a prolonged downturn. $ADA’s response to buying interest and cryptocurrency market conditions will determine the strength and timing of the recovery.
Notably, $ADA hit $0.2813 last week, marking a five-month high. However, the price quickly retraced from that level but has since found support around $0.23, and many analysts believe the rally will resume soon.
UPDATE: Crypto Banter’s Sheldon says “you can see very clearly where the buys are on #Cardano $ADA. I do think a lot of these tokens are going to be here for a week or two, and then start moving ridiculously.” pic.twitter.com/x8m5hPDBqJ
— Angry Crypto Show (@angrycryptoshow) October 13, 2026
CryptoUS Predicts a Solana-Type Comeback
Sheldon’s outlook follows comments from CryptoUS pundit George, who argued that Cardano will stage a recovery similar to Solana’s performance soon.
George noted that $ADA has repeatedly suffered deep declines during crypto winters before recovering. He also highlighted Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson’s continued involvement as a key factor supporting the project’s long-term resilience.
Solana provides a notable historical comparison. SOL fell to about $8.14 in 2022 after the FTX collapse, then climbed above $125 by 2023. It subsequently reached an all-time high of around $294 in January 2025.
That represented a gain of more than 3,500% from its December 2022 low to its peak. George sees Cardano following a comparable recovery path.
Meanwhile, $ADA will need to overcome its current price weakness and attract sustained buying demand to establish a similar trajectory.
$ADA Recovery Hinges on Its Next Move
At $0.2346, Cardano remains well below its previous all-time high of approximately $3.10. Its 11% monthly gain signals improved performance despite the weekly decline.
Sheldon’s seven-to-10-day forecast puts the focus on $ADA’s ability to stabilize and recover during the coming sessions.
Both analysts anticipate a Cardano comeback from different perspectives. Sheldon focuses on near-term buying zones and an imminent market turnaround, while George points to the prospect of a longer-term recovery modeled on Solana’s post-FTX rally.
Cameras have started rolling in the French Alps on “Pumping Black” a high-adrenaline thriller being led by Jonathan Bailey (“Wicked,” “Jurassic World: Rebirth”) and Oscar winner Natalie Portman (“May December,” “Good Sex”).
First announced by Variety earlier this year ahead of its market launch in Cannes by Anton Studios, the film also stars Lukas Gage (The White Lotus), Alex Akpobome (Industry), with new additions Daniel Quinn-Toye (“Sterling Point”), Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen (“The Weight”), César winner Arieh Worthalter (“The Goldman Case”) and Emmy winner Tony Hale (“Veep”) now having joined the ensemble cast. The shoot will runs until early December.
Set in the cut-throat world of elite professional cycling, “Pumping Black” follows Taylor Mace, 35 years old and aging out of the sport. He is taken under the wing of Andrea Lathe, a doctor driven by her own thirst for victory and power. As the race progresses, Taylor must take increasingly dark measures to protect both his secret and his lead.
Mimi Cave (“Holland,” “Fresh”) directs from a screenplay by Haley Hope Bartels. Producers include Stacey Sher for Shiny Penny (“The Hateful Eight,” “Heretic”), Portman and Sophie Mas for MountainA (“May December,” “Arco”), Cave and Sébastien Raybaud for Anton Studios (“Victorian Psycho,” “My Darling California”).Katie Aquino from Shiny Penny and Kai Raka from Catchlight Studios serve as executive producers.
Anton Studios is fully financing the film and handling worldwide sales with CAA co-repping the US.
Cave’s creative team includes cinematographer Justin Brown (“I Am Not Okay with This”), production designer JC Molina (“Honey Boy”) and casting director Kharmel Cochrane (“Saltburn”). Martin Pensa, who edited Cave’s “Fresh,” returns as editor. Pierre-Yves Gayraud (“Cloud Atlas”) serves as costume designer, with Géraldine Lemaire (“The French Dispatch”) and Fabienne Robineau (“Robin Hood”) as hair and make-up.
Bailey is repped by CAA, Conway Van Gelder Grant and Anonymous Content; and law firm Hansen, Jacobson, Teller, Hoberman, Newman, Warren, Richman, Rush, Kaller, Gellman, Meigs & Fox LLP. Portman is repped by CAA, George Sheanshang and Agence Adéquat. Cave is repped by CAA and Jackoway Austen. Sher is repped by CAA and Gang, Tyre, Ramer. Bartels is repped by CAA, Untitled, and Yorn Levine. Gage is repped by WME, Luber Roklin Entertainment and Goodman Genow Schenkman. Akpobome is repped by Gersh and Range Media Partners. Quinn-Toye is repped by Independent Talent Group, CAA, Public Eye Communications and Gang, Tyre, Ramer, Brown & Passman. Tønnesen is repped by Accelerate and Lindberg Management. Worthalter is repped by Agence Adéquat. Hale is repped by UTA and Hansen, Jacobson, Teller, Hoberman, Newman, Warren, Richman, Rush, Kaller, Gellman, Meigs & Fox LLP.
Character.AI filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware on October 12 to sell itself under court supervision, and says the app will be wound down if no buyer keeps it running.
Disney is the opening bidder, offering $20 million for a non-exclusive perpetual license to some of the startup’s intellectual property, weeks after hiring its CEO as Disney’s first CTO.
The company pointed users attached to their AI companions toward mental health resources, just two weeks after launching two new chat models and a cheaper $4.99 subscription.
Character.AI, the app where millions of people spend hours chatting with AI versions of fictional heroes and made-up partners, has filed for bankruptcy.
The company announced Monday that it started a voluntary Chapter 11 process, a type of U.S. bankruptcy that lets a company keep operating while a judge supervises how its debts get paid or how its assets get sold. The case was filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.
Character.AI isn’t trying to restructure its way back to health. It wants a court-supervised sale of all or substantially all of its assets, and if no bidder agrees to keep the service alive, the company said the platform “will be wound down”—corporate speak for switched off.
Disney Worldwide Services, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, signed on before the filing as the “stalking horse” bidder, according to Character.AI’s press release. In a bankruptcy auction, that is the opening offer that sets a floor every other buyer has to beat.
The media giant is offering $20 million for a non-exclusive, perpetual license to some of Character.AI’s intellectual property and certain legal claims, plus transition services run by former Character.AI employees it has already hired. Non-exclusive means Disney gets to use that tech forever, but so can whoever else ends up buying it, and other bidders can still top the offer.
The company expects the sale to close in late November or early December. Character Technologies Inc., the company’s legal name, estimated both its assets and its liabilities at $50 million to $100 million in its bankruptcy petition.
Three and a half years ago, Andreessen Horowitz led a $150 million funding round that valued Character.AI at $1 billion, with a16z partner Sarah Wang tweeting that “we are at the iPhone moment of AI.” Founded in 2021 by former Google engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, the app lets anyone build a chatbot with a personality and share it with others.
BitcoinBTC · USD
$82,015−1.2%
Oct 7Oct 9Oct 11Oct 12Oct 14
$84.2k$83.1k$81.9k$80.7k
24h HighHigh$84,025
24h LowLow$82,294
VolVol$1.3B
Market projectionsOdds by Myriad
→
Google came calling in August 2024, rehiring both founders and part of the research team in a roughly $2.7 billion deal that also licensed Character.AI’s technology. Silicon Valley calls this kind of arrangement an acqui-hire, buying the talent without technically buying the company, and Character.AI later largely abandoned building its own large language models, the AI engines that generate the chatbots’ text.
Two months after the Google deal, Florida mother Megan Garcia sued Character.AI, its founders and Google, alleging that her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, died by suicide after becoming emotionally attached to a chatbot modeled on Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen. More lawsuits from other families followed, and in September 2025 the Federal Trade Commission ordered Character.AI and six other tech companies to explain how they protect minors.
A month later, Character.AI banned users under 18 from open-ended chats with its characters, cutting off its core product for its youngest fans. In January, the company and Google agreed to settle lawsuits brought by families in Florida, Colorado, New York, and Texas.
In September 2025, Disney’s lawyers sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist letter, a formal legal demand to stop, over chatbots imitating Disney characters, and the startup took them down. This past September, Disney named Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand its first-ever chief technology officer and said several of the startup’s engineers would join him.
Colin Adams, now Character.AI’s CEO, said the company spent the past year trying to sustain the business amid “significant legal, regulatory, and operational headwinds” before the board chose a court-supervised sale.
Besides the legal hurdles, the company was burning too much money without reporting enough revenue, reporting “an operating loss of approximately $8-9 million per month.”
Character AI also struggled to raise more capital, which ended up making the whole operation unsustainable. “Notwithstanding the progress that has been made with regulators and personal injury claimants and enhancements to platform safety, Character has faced challenges in obtaining new investment capital,” Character AI CEO Collin Adams said in a sworn statement.
On September 28, Character.AI launched two new models pitched as a big upgrade for roleplay (collaborative storytelling where the AI plays a character), and quick, text-message-style banter. It also rolled out a cheaper subscription called (c.ai) lite, priced at $4.99 a month or $2.49 a week.
Fourteen days later, the company was in bankruptcy court.
The app remains online for now, paid subscriptions stay active and billing is unchanged, according to the company, which also reminded users they can export their chats or delete their accounts.
Character.AI also linked to a support page for anyone struggling with the news, a tacit admission that for some users the app is not just entertainment. AI companions—chatbots designed to act as friends or partners that remember past conversations—can become a daily emotional anchor for people who talk to them for hours.
The page points users to Koko, a nonprofit offering free, anonymous mini-courses of five to 10 minutes on coping with stress and dark thoughts, and to a directory of free helplines staffed by real people. Its very first suggestion, however, is a conversation with a “supportive AI guide,” which is to say a chatbot to help people cope with losing their chatbots.
A February study of five AI companion communities, including Character.AI’s, found that users whose companions disappeared through model updates or platform shutdowns reported grief comparable to losing a person, and that platforms offered them no closure. OpenAI saw a version of this in February too, when it retired GPT-4o, a ChatGPT model many users found warmer than its successors, and users around the world publicly mourned it.
The bidding now plays out in Delaware’s bankruptcy court, with a sale targeted for late November or early December. If no buyer commits to keeping Character.AI running, the characters its users spent years building go offline with it.
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
The broader financial landscape shows that digital fraud remains a critical concern, particularly as new tactics continue to emerge and evolve. The report from the Bank of Thailand indicates a proactive approach to understanding these threats, which may influence regulatory frameworks moving forward. As digital transactions increase, so does the importance of implementing effective fraud prevention measures across the financial sector.
The Bank of Thailand is responsible for overseeing the stability of the financial system in Thailand, including regulatory frameworks that govern digital transactions. The recent report reflects its commitment to enhancing security measures against digital fraud, which has become a growing concern in the region. By collaborating with the Poey Ungpakorn Economic Research Institute, the bank aims to implement strategies informed by successful practices from other Asian nations.
Eyes on These Levels
As traders and financial institutions digest the insights from this report, they should monitor developments in regulatory frameworks aimed at enhancing digital security. The focus on collaboration and comprehensive defenses may lead to new policies that affect transaction protocols and user safety. Stakeholders can expect increased vigilance in monitoring fraud trends and adapting to evolving tactics, ensuring a safer financial environment for all.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
