Character.AI is facing multiple legal threats over alleged negative impacts on teenagers' mental health and has banned underage users from engaging in open-ended chats on its platform. Instead, teens will now be permitted to use a new "Stories" format—an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure-style experience with AI characters that offers structured choices rather than free-form conversation.

This feature is available to all users, but Character.AI promotes it specifically as a way to "enhance" the experience for those under 18. In October of last year, the company announced it would shut down teen chat functionality on November 25 while developing age-appropriate safeguards that automatically route minor users into "more conservative" AI interactions.

Currently, Character.AI is confronting a lawsuit alleging the platform contributed to a teenager's suicide, along with other claims linking conversations between minors and AI personas to psychological harm.

The Stories feature works by letting users select from two or three AI characters, pick a genre, and either craft their own setting or have the AI generate one for them. Character.AI then builds a "guided narrative," allowing users to frequently make decisions that shape the story’s direction. The experience also includes AI-generated images, with the company noting that "richer multimodal elements are coming soon."