Disney's first CTO once ran a company Disney accused of stealing its characters

Disney has named its first-ever chief technology officer, poaching Karandeep Anand from Character.AI, the chatbot startup Disney hit with cease-and-desist letters last year over alleged use of its characters.

The newly created role reports to CEO Josh D'Amaro and consolidates Disney's infrastructure, product, engineering, and data and AI platforms under one executive. At a company Disney's size, tech leadership had been distributed across the business. A single accountable head now owns the stack for the first time.

Anand took the Character.AI CEO seat about a year ago and pushed the startup into short-form "microdrama" video, a mobile-first product aimed at character-driven audiences. Disney is the same company that hit Character.AI with cease-and-desist letters last year, alleging the startup's tools infringed on its copyrighted characters. That dispute remains unresolved.

The hire lands after Disney's reported partnership with OpenAI has fallen apart, and Anand is the first visible AI appointment since the split. A chatbot-CEO hire points the AI roadmap toward consumer-facing, character-driven products rather than back-office content tooling.