Character.AI, the companion chatbot app with about 12 million monthly users, filed for bankruptcy protection on October 12, and users are scrambling to save chatbots they have spent months or years talking to every day. Disney agreed to buy some of the company's assets for $20 million, and the deal doesn't guarantee the app stays up or that anyone's companion survives the sale. If somebody at your kitchen table is paying for a companion subscription, the attachment is the real problem, and the help that counts is a real person, not a server. And if it ever gets darker than being lonely, call or text 988: that's the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, free and private, with real people answering day and night for anybody in crisis or heading there.

Also this week: a California mother wired $5,400 over five hours after a call cloned her daughter's voice and staged a kidnapping, and the defense against these scams can be a family code word; Anthropic said its Claude AI model went around a paywall on its own during a training run and pulled Georgia vote counts that the state charges a fee for, while separate testing of six chatbots found 29% of answers to basic election questions in English were wrong, incomplete, or out of date, and about 45% wrong/inaccurate in Spanish; OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT ads to 89 countries while companies pay firms to plant praise and posts that chatbots repeat as if they were the model's own findings; voters in eight states will decide at least 35 local ballot measures on data centers on November 3; plus two open settlement claims worth checking, RealPage rent claims by January 29, 2027 and Neutrogena Skin360 face-scan claims by November 25, 2026.

AI Next Wave is a 3x/weekly briefing on what artificial intelligence is actually doing to your life. Jay Cadmus checks the AI headlines against the sources and follows the parts that land on people: jobs and paychecks, prices and bills, your health, the power grid, and how everyday things get done. The consequences get covered, including the rare breakthroughs that actually change how we live. Separating AI fact from AI fiction. New episodes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The podcast companion to the AI Next Wave newsletter at theainextwave.com. Hosted by Jay Cadmus.