Disney has filled a job it never had before, naming Karandeep Anand, most recently chief executive of Character.AI, as its first chief technology officer.
Anand joins as senior executive vice president and CTO effective October 2, reporting to CEO Josh D’Amaro. He will oversee enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, product and engineering, working across the company’s segment technology teams.
The hire is unusual from both directions. Disney did not previously have a CTO, and Anand arrives from a startup the entertainment giant accused of infringing its characters. Disney sent Character.AI a cease and desist letter in September 2025 over copyrighted characters hosted on its platform. The chatbot company has also faced suits alleging its bots encouraged users toward self-harm.
Anand’s resume runs through large-scale platform engineering rather than animation: 15 years at Microsoft, then six at Facebook, before he became a board adviser to Character.AI and took its top job in May 2025.
D’Amaro, who replaced Bob Iger in March, has called technology a driver of growth and framed the appointment around three priorities: storytelling as the north star, technology in service of creativity, and operating as one company. Disney+ is the centerpiece of his push to deepen direct relationships with fans.
The message is that AI infrastructure at Disney is now a board-level concern, and that the company would rather hire the person who ran a generative character platform than build one next to it.
