Character.AI's "250 Free Agents" Are Really 20. Here's The Court Math.

On October 12, 2026, Character Technologies Inc. filed Chapter 11 in Delaware (case 26-11603 BLS). Disney is the stalking-horse bidder with a $20M offer for a non-exclusive IP license, and the bidding procedures motion commits roughly $180M over three years to retain about 65 employees. Every sourcing list circulating this week says the other ~250 are on the market. The court docket says those lists are wrong.

The real free-agent pool is 20 people, not 250

Character.AI's own wages motion puts the September 30, 2026 headcount at roughly 86 full-time employees, not the 316 that third-party profile aggregators show. Subtract the 66 who have already accepted Disney offers and the actual free-agent pool is about 20 current FTEs, plus a long tail of alumni who left during the 2024 Google exodus and the slow bleed since.

The gap between 86 and 316 is where every rushed sourcing list is breaking. Open-web people-trackers count anyone who still has "Character.ai" in their LinkedIn headline, which includes:

• Contractors and offshore trust-and-safety vendors who were never W-2.
• Researchers who left for Google DeepMind in August 2024 and never updated their profile.
• Short-tenure PMs and designers who rolled off months before the filing.
• Stale profiles from the pre-2024 growth phase.

If you build a pipeline off the 316 number, you will spend two weeks InMailing people who already work at Google, Anthropic, or a stealth lab. The defensible target is the ~20 current FTEs the court identifies, plus a known cohort of 2024 to 2026 alumni who are actually re-opening to offers because the brand is now a bankruptcy headline.

86

What the court filings actually say

The bidding procedures motion (Doc 15, 58 pages, signed by Erin R. Fay of Wilson Sonsini) and the wages motion together give a cleaner org chart than any LinkedIn scrape. Here is the reconciliation every recruiter working this deal should keep open in a tab.

Other hard facts worth memorizing before you pitch anyone:

• Last payroll on Sept 30, 2026 was approximately $995,000.
• Bids must beat a $21.7M floor ($20M plus a $700K break-up fee plus $1M minimum overbid).
• Auction is November 23, 2026. Sale hearing is November 24.
• Platform scale at filing: ~163M registered users, ~12M MAU, ~$2.5M/month ad revenue, $57M unrestricted cash.
• Disney's license is non-exclusive, with nine patents assigned.
• Former CEO Karandeep Anand already left to join Disney as CTO. Colin Adams signed the Chapter 11 statement as current CEO.

The non-exclusive clause is the sleeper. It means a second bidder can walk in on November 23, top $21.7M, and still get the app, the chat history, the fine-tuned models, and the 12M MAU. That bidder will need operators overnight, and they will be fishing the exact same ~20-person pool Disney already picked over.

Why $923k per head is the new price of a consumer-LLM operator

Disney's $180M over three years for ~65 hires works out to about $2.77M per head, or roughly $923k annual total comp. That is the market-clearing price a Fortune 50 is willing to pay to keep OpenAI, xAI, Meta, or a returning Google from re-acquiring these specific people, and it resets the floor for every Character.AI leaver who is not covered.

If you are a founder trying to hire out of this pool with a $350k base and 0.5% equity, you are not in the auction. The counter-bidders already running this math include:

• Google and Google DeepMind, which absorbed Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, and ~30 researchers in the August 2024 license deal for ~$2.7B.
• Microsoft, which has been paying staff-eng LLM leads similarly structured multi-year packages.
• xAI and Meta, both of whom have the balance sheets to clear the floor.

If you cannot clear $900k TC for a senior IC, you are not bidding on Character.AI alumni. You are bidding on their rejections.

The second-order effect is on anyone trying to hire senior consumer-LLM engineers who never worked at Character.AI. Disney just published the comp band. Expect your current senior ICs with real post-training experience to forward you the court filings by Monday.

The 115-person national pool you are actually bidding into

In Refolk's index of professional profiles, only 115 US senior-and-above engineers list Large Language Models as a core skill. Of the top current employers in that pool, Google holds six, Microsoft two, and Google DeepMind two. That is the universe your Character.AI shortlist is being compared against.

This matters because the "consumer LLM engineer" label is doing a lot of work. There are thousands of people who have fine-tuned a model, and a few hundred nationally who have shipped a user-facing LLM product at tens of millions of MAU scale. Character.AI is one of a handful of companies that produced that specific operator profile at volume. The others are OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude.ai), Google (Gemini app), xAI (Grok), Meta (Meta AI), Perplexity, and a cluster of Chinese consumer apps.

That is the entire supply. When Disney takes 65 of them off the board in one filing, the remaining ~20 are not a long tail. They are a double-digit share of the deployable senior-plus pool in the country for this exact job description.

What Refolk's index shows about Character.AI specifically

Searching Refolk for current engineering titles still listing Character.ai returns only four profiles: three Software Engineers and one Research Engineer, in the SF Bay Area, Sunnyvale, Issaquah WA, and Harrisonburg VA. That is consistent with the court's ~20-person remaining FTE count once you add in the non-engineering staff (ops, trust and safety, finance, legal) that the wages motion also covers.

The useful signal from that scrape is not the four names. It is confirmation that the 2024 Google exodus profiles have mostly been relabeled, so a Boolean search on "Character.AI" in a legacy ATS is going to miss the alumni you actually want. The sharper query is a plain-English one that describes the person, not the tenure, which is the gap Refolk closes: describe the operator profile you want and get back a ranked list across GitHub, LinkedIn, and the open web, including the people who have already scrubbed Character.AI from their headline.

The six-week window and what to do with it

The hiring window is October 12 (filing) to November 24 (sale hearing), roughly six weeks. After that, severance mechanics, COBRA logistics, and competing offers lock in choices for 6 to 12 months. Here is the sequencing that works:

1. Week 1 (now). Pull the ~20-person current FTE list by cross-referencing the Stretto creditor matrix (claims and noticing agent) with LinkedIn tenure and GitHub commit history on Character.AI's open-source repos. Separate engineers from trust-and-safety and ops.
2. Week 2. Rebuild the 2024 Google-exodus alumni list. These are the Noam Shazeer cohort peers who did not go to DeepMind, or who did and are now 15 months in and unhappy. There are roughly 30 of them per the original Google deal reporting.
3. Weeks 3-4. First outreach. The message that works right now is not "sorry about the news." It is "here is a comp number that beats Disney's $923k average and a product scope that is not a Disney IP wrapper." Lead with scope.
4. Weeks 5-6. Close before the sale hearing. Any auction topper on November 23 will be making retention offers on November 25. If you are not in writing by then, you are negotiating against a fresh retention cliff.

The counter-move most recruiters are missing: the 56 who formally resigned to join Disney are not on Disney's payroll yet. A better offer in the next three weeks is still live.

$923k

Who the counter-bidder could be, and why you should be sourcing for them

The most valuable sourcing list this week is not for Disney's competitors. It is for whoever tops $21.7M at the November 23 auction and inherits the app, the chats, and the 12M MAU without a single operator. That bidder will need 20 to 40 engineers in 72 hours.

Names worth having pre-briefed, none of them confirmed as bidders:

• xAI, which has been openly recruiting consumer-LLM product leads and would use the user base to accelerate Grok's companion features.
• Meta, which has a stated interest in character and companion AI and the balance sheet to clear the floor.
• Perplexity, which does not fit the companion-AI profile but has repeatedly bid on distressed consumer-AI assets.
• Chinese consumer-AI operators, who want the 163M registered users and the training data Disney is not buying. CFIUS makes this harder, not impossible.

If you are an in-house recruiter at any of the above, your Character.AI pipeline should already be built. If you are an agency, this is a four-week window to pre-sell the same shortlist to three potential buyers.

FAQ

How many Character.AI employees are actually available to hire?

Court filings put the September 30, 2026 full-time headcount at approximately 86, of whom 66 accepted Disney offers. That leaves roughly 20 current FTEs who are genuinely free agents, not the 250-plus figure circulating from LinkedIn scrapes. The larger number counts contractors, offshore staff, and alumni who left during the 2024 Google licensing deal and never updated their profiles.

What is Disney paying per Character.AI employee it retained?

Disney's bidding procedures motion commits approximately $180M over three years for about 65 covered hires, which works out to roughly $2.77M per head or $923k per year in total comp. That number is now the de facto floor for competitive offers in the senior consumer-LLM engineering market, and any founder trying to hire from this pool with a sub-$900k package will lose to Disney or to a counter-bidder.

When does the hiring window close?

The bankruptcy auction is scheduled for November 23, 2026, with the sale hearing on November 24. Practically, that gives recruiters about six weeks from the October 12 filing before severance mechanics and winning-bidder retention offers lock most of these candidates into 6 to 12 month commitments. The highest-leverage outreach happens before the auction, not after.

Should I be sourcing for Disney's competitors or for the auction topper?

Both, but the auction topper is the under-covered opportunity. Whoever beats the $21.7M floor on November 23 gets a non-exclusive IP license, the app, the chats, and 12M monthly active users, with zero operators attached. That bidder will need 20 to 40 engineers immediately and will be drawing from the same tiny national pool of ~115 senior consumer-LLM engineers that Refolk's index shows is already concentrated at Google, Microsoft, and DeepMind.