Disney‘s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Character.AI demanding the AI chatbot company remove numerous characters owned by the Mouse House — and accusing the startup of “blatantly infringing” Disney’s copyrights.

Character.AI said it responded to Disney’s legal threat by removing the characters cited in the letter.

“It has come to Disney’s attention that Character Technologies, Inc. (‘Character.ai’) has been using Disney’s copyrighted characters as interactive chatbots in its commercial Character.ai service without authorization,” a Disney lawyer wrote in the letter, a copy of which Variety has viewed. “Apparently trained without authorization on Disney’s copyrighted works, the Character.ai service features countless chatbots that exploit Disney’s copyrighted works and trademarks, presenting immersive versions of Disney’s famous and beloved characters.”

The letter continued: “These actions mislead and confuse consumers, including vulnerable young people, to believe that they are interacting with Disney’s characters, and to falsely believe that Disney has licensed these characters to, and endorsed their use by, Character.ai. In fact, Character.ai is freeriding off the goodwill of Disney’s famous marks and brands, and blatantly infringing Disney’s copyrights. Even worse, Character.ai’s infringing chatbots are known, in some cases, to be sexually exploitive and otherwise harmful and dangerous to children, offending Disney’s consumers and extraordinarily damaging Disney’s reputation and goodwill.”

“Disney will not allow your company to hijack its characters, damage its brands, or infringe its copyrights and/or trademarks. Character.ai’s conduct is egregious and must stop immediately,” the letter said.

The Disney-owned characters mentioned in the letter as existing on Charater.AI’s platform included Anna and Elsa from the “Frozen” movies, Moana, The Simpsons, Buzz Lightyear and Woody from “Toy Story,” Marvel’s Spider-Man, Deadpool and Iron Man, and the Star Wars franchise’s Darth Vader, Yoda, The Mandalorian and C-3PO. Others included Captain America, Peter Parker, Padme Amidala, Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Black Widow, Natasha Romanoff, Luke Skywalker and Logan Howlett.

In a statement to Variety, a rep for Character.AI said it removed the Disney characters cited in the letter.

“All of the Characters on our service are generated by users — it’s an incredible outpouring of creativity,” the spokesperson said. “Some of those characters are original creations, and some are inspired by existing characters that people love. It’s like fan fiction, but in an interactive form. However, it’s always up to rightsholders to decide how people may interact with their IP, and we respond swiftly to requests to remove content that rightsholders report to us. The takedown you’re referring to was in response to such a request. These characters have been removed.”

The Character.AI spokesperson added, “We want to partner with the industry and rightsholders to empower them to bring their characters to our platform. Our goal is to give IP owners the tools to create controlled, engaging and revenue-generating experiences from deep fandom for their characters and stories, expanding their reach using our new, interactive format.”

The letter was sent Sept. 18 to Character.AI by Disney’s attorneys at Jenner & Block. News of the cease-and-desist letter was previously reported by Axios.

Meanwhile, Disney has pursued lawsuits against AI companies that it alleges had infringed its copyrights. Disney, together with NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery, has sued Midjourney and Chinese AI company MiniMax, seeking to recover monetary damages and injunctions to block the alleged infringement.

Character.AI launched its service in late 2021. In 2023, it raised $150 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, which valued the company at around $1 billion. Last year, Google entered into a $2.7 billion licensing deal with Character.AI and hired CEO and co-founder Noam Shazeer (and former Google engineer), per a Wall Street Journal report. Shazeer is currently VP of engineering and co-lead of Google’s Gemini AI division.

The Menlo Park, California-based company describes its platform like this: “Character.AI leads you to the crossroads where storytelling, gaming, social connection, and creative expression converge to captivate you like never before.”