Google hires top talent from startup Character AI, signs licensing agreement

Startup Character.AI said Friday it has signed a deal with Alphabet subsidiary Google under which the search engine giant has a non-exclusive license to the chatbot maker’s large language model technology.

The deal, which follows deals struck by Microsoft and Amazon in recent months, will see Character.AI co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas return to Google, where they previously worked.

The remaining deals are under scrutiny from regulators, reflecting growing concerns in the U.S. and Europe about how tech giants are doing AI deals, investing billions to develop AI infrastructure and hiring top researchers from startups.

Character.AI will receive more funding as part of a deal with Google, the startup said in a blog post, without disclosing the amount. Dominic Perella, Character.AI’s general counsel, will become interim CEO, effective immediately.

“We are especially excited to welcome back Noam, a distinguished researcher in machine learning, who is joining the Google DeepMind research team along with a small number of his collaborators,” a Google spokesperson said in an email.

In March, Microsoft paid $650 million to hire the co-founders and dozens of employees from AI startup Inflection. In June, Amazon hired several co-founders and employees from Adept, another AI startup.

Character.AI previously raised $193 million in venture capital from investors including Andreessen Horowitz. It was in talks to raise hundreds of millions from Google, Reuters reported in November. Inflection and Adept raised $1.3 billion and $415 million, respectively.