The Character.AI Data Export: What Is in the File, How to Open It and Where It Can Go

Adults only. The section on rebuilding a character names companion apps built for adults. Everything else applies to any Character.AI user. The guide is non-explicit.

How this guide was made. This is a documentation-based guide. It relies on Character.AI’s help centre and blog, SillyTavern’s documentation, the CAI Tools repository and docs, one hands-on account of the export published by a third-party site in May 2026, and r/CharacterAI threads from 17 to 20 October 2026. We have not opened an export of our own. Where the official pages are silent, we say so, and the unofficial account is labelled as such.

The question nobody on the subreddit could answer

On 19 October a user on r/CharacterAI wrote that they had requested their data export on 13 October and asked what the email would look like. Nobody could tell them. Two days earlier, another user asked whether the official export “actually downloads all of your chats”, after a browser extension failed to save the full history of a bot with more than a thousand conversations. The replies were a restatement of the official steps, a note to check spam, and one person who had seen reports of exports that never arrived.

That gap is the reason for this guide. The export is the one thing Character.AI’s blog tells you to do about your data during its sale, and the company publishes almost nothing about what you get.

What Character.AI says, and what it leaves out

The help centre article “How do I download my data?” says you can request “a copy of your account data from your profile settings”:

• Web: Profile, then Profile Settings, then Account, then Manage Account & Data, then Export Data. A pop-up confirms that you will receive an email with a download link.
• Mobile app: Profile, then the Settings icon, then Legal & Privacy, then Export Data. A “Success” banner appears once the request is in.

Then the two sentences that matter: “Your export may take 3-4 weeks to complete”, and “The link will be valid for 7 days from the time the email is sent, so be sure to download your data before it expires.” The email goes to the address associated with your account. The article is tagged “data privacy” and “GDPR”, which tells you what this is: a data-access process, not a backup feature.

What it does not say: the file format, the file names, whether images, voice or group chats are included, whether deleted chats are included, the email’s subject line, or what happens to a pending request if you delete your account. Notebookcheck made the same observation on 14 October: “The help page does not list what the export contains.” The blog’s sale FAQ adds only that “you can delete your account or export your data through the app or the Character.ai website”.

The arithmetic of 3 to 4 weeks

The company expects its sale to finish “by the end of November or perhaps early December 2026”, with a bid deadline proposed for 20 November. A request made this week should arrive before either. A request made in mid-November may not. Our guide to the 30 October hearing has the full timetable.

What people are seeing while they wait

Three threads from the past four days, paraphrased:

• 17 October. The CAI Tools extension would not download the whole history of one bot with more than 1,000 chats, so the poster turned to the official export and asked if it was complete. Nobody in the thread had opened one. A reply, apparently from a support account, restated the steps and the 3 to 4 week wait; another said to check spam.
• 19 October. A post titled “Send me my link now!” got one reply: everyone is waiting, the system is overloaded, and re-requesting will not speed it up.

The practical reading: request once, do not request again, and check the inbox on your account daily from the third week.

What is probably inside the zip, from the one account we found

The only detailed description of an actual export we could find is a guide published by AIInsightsNews on 25 May 2026, by Nimrah Khan. It says it was built “from hands-on testing, not platform documentation”, with screenshots taken in May 2026, including one of the export email and one of the zip. It does not publish a full sample.

Two details are worth remembering when you open your own file. It says the message text sits under raw_content, not under a field called “text”, and warns that a script looking for “text” returns nothing. And it says messages can be sorted by create_time.

One caution. The account reported turnaround of about an hour to a few days in May; the help centre now says 3 to 4 weeks, so the process has changed and the layout may have too. Use it as a map, not a promise.

How to open and read the file

You do not need special software.

1. Extract the zip first. On Windows, right-click and choose Extract All; on a Mac, double-click. Opening files inside an unextracted zip is where “the file is empty” complaints usually come from.
2. Open the small files in a text editor. A .json file is plain text. Look for your own email address in the account file to confirm the export is yours.
3. Open the big file in something built for it. Firefox renders a .json file as a collapsible tree if you drag it into a tab; Visual Studio Code opens large files and lets you search.
4. Search for a character’s name to see whether a given chat is in the file at all.
5. Check whether it is JSON or JSON Lines. One document starting with “{” or “[” is JSON. One “{…}” per line is JSON Lines, which matters for the next step and for SillyTavern.

Turning it into readable text

If the May 2026 description still holds, a few lines of Python will print every message in order. Save this as export_to_text.py. It walks the whole file looking for raw_content, so it does not depend on the exact layout, and it falls back to line-by-line reading if the file is JSON Lines.

import json, sys

def walk(x):
    if isinstance(x, dict):
        if "raw_content" in x:
            yield x.get("create_time", ""), x["raw_content"]
        for v in x.values():
            yield from walk(v)
    elif isinstance(x, list):
        for v in x:
            yield from walk(v)

with open(sys.argv[1], encoding="utf-8") as f:
    text = f.read()
try:
    data = json.loads(text)
except json.JSONDecodeError:
    data = [json.loads(line) for line in text.splitlines() if line.strip()]

for when, message in walk(data):
    print(when, message, sep="\t")

Run it as python export_to_text.py message.json > chats.txt. If it prints nothing, the field names have changed: find one message you recognise in an editor and swap “raw_content” for the key around it. If you cannot see field names at all, the file is not what the May account describes, and the honest next step is to ask support what you have been sent.

Where the file can and cannot go

The Reddit user who had used one bot for over a year wanted a backup “just to be safe”. What they will get is a record, not a transfer.

Companion apps: no import

Candy AI, CrushOn AI, SpicyChat, Nectar AI, Janitor AI, Kindroid and Nomi do not describe any import of Character.AI data on the terms, docs or help pages we read for our switching guide. If an app claims to “import your Character.AI chats”, read what it actually does and what it asks permission for before uploading anything.

SillyTavern: only through an unofficial extension

SillyTavern’s documentation is the most specific we found on chat portability. It lists imports from TavernAI, Text Generation WebUI, Agnai, KoboldAI Lite and RisuAI. For Character.AI it says to use the CAI Tools browser extension. Its own .jsonl chat exports can be re-imported as they are; plain-text exports “can’t be re-imported again” because they lose the metadata. The official Character.AI export is not on its import list. The documented route is CAI Tools while the site is up, or converting the official file yourself once you know its layout.

CAI Tools: unofficial, and already straining

CAI Tools is a browser extension on the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-ons, with a GitHub repository under irsat000 and docs on GitBook. It is not made by Character.AI or SillyTavern; the repository’s README says it exists “only for bug reports, feature requests and questions” and that the code there “is not up-to-date”. It works only while you are logged in to a running Character.AI, and the 17 October Reddit report says it did not capture a 1,000-plus chat history completely. It is a reasonable tool for pulling character cards and single chats today, not a substitute for the official export, and it stops working the moment the site does.

What travels on its own

Your definitions and persona are the only parts you can save today without waiting 3 to 4 weeks, and the only parts any app will accept. Copy them this week. Our guide to what memory means in companion apps explains why pins and memories do not transfer.

Rebuilding a character from the export (adults)

If you are an adult and want a saved character to exist somewhere else, these creators take a description and a persona.

• Candy AI is built around one or a few companions you design, with chat, voice and generated images. Its creator takes a description; it has no library import. It is 18+.
• Nectar AI describes an HD companion creator and roleplay chat. Its terms say users under 18 may only access SFW areas.
• CrushOn AI and SpicyChat keep the community-library model closest to Character.AI’s, with content ratings on each character, and let you publish a bot from a definition. Both require users to be 18 or older.

Before pasting anything beyond a definition, read the destination’s privacy notice. Candy AI’s says third-party LLM providers may receive the content of your messages and that de-identified interactions may be used to train its models. Nectar AI’s lists messages among the content collected and does not say whether chats are used for training. Paste definitions, not chat logs. Our AI companion privacy checklist covers the other questions, and the roleplay studio can tidy a definition into a sheet that works on any platform.

Keeping the file safe

The export, if the May 2026 description is right, contains your email address and every message you sent. Treat it as a diary.

• Keep two copies in two places: a laptop and an external drive, or an encrypted cloud folder.
• Password-protect it; a zip with a password or an encrypted disk image both work.
• Do not post it, and if you share a snippet, remove names and timestamps first.
• Do not delete your Character.AI account until the export has arrived and you have opened it. The help centre says deletion is permanent and cannot be reversed.

If nothing arrives after 4 weeks, contact support with the date of your request. The help centre tags this process as GDPR-related, which for users in the EU and UK means a right of access with its own timescales; we are not lawyers and cannot say how that applies to you.

What we could not confirm

• The export’s official format and contents. The help centre does not describe them, and we have not opened one.
• Whether the May 2026 description (zip, three JSON files, raw_content) still matches what the system sends now that it takes 3 to 4 weeks.
• The sender address and subject line of the export email.
• Whether deleted chats, group chats, images or voice are included.
• Whether a pending export is cancelled if the account is deleted.
• Whether exports are arriving at the stated pace; several Reddit users were still waiting on 19 October.

For what the sale means for your data, see Character.AI is being sold: what happens to your chats. For how we source and date guides like this, see how AITried reviews AI products.