What did Italy's regulator find when it fined Replika and Character.AI, and what does it mean for you?

The Garante, Italy’s data protection authority, found that the age checks at both Replika and Character.AI could be got around. In its tests, a user who declared they were 15 still registered at Character.AI, whose terms bar under-16s in the EEA. At Replika, a changed birth date or a different email got past the check.

It fined Luka Inc., the maker of Replika, 5 million euros (decision dated April 10, 2025). It fined Character Technologies, the maker of Character.AI, 158,000 euros (decision dated July 3, 2026). Both privacy notices also left users unable to tell what happened to their data, and that part you can check yourself in a few minutes.

We did that check on November 11, 2026. Replika’s account creation page offers Google, Apple, or an email and password, and the first screen has no date-of-birth field:

Replika’s privacy policy, updated October 28, 2026, says “We ask your date of birth when you create an account”, so the question presumably comes on a later step. We stopped here because continuing means creating an account, and we have not seen the age screen. Character.AI’s home page blocked us with a Cloudflare error from our network on November 11, so we did not see its signup; its privacy policy and terms did load, and we read them.

What the Garante found at Replika

The Garante started the Replika case itself after press reports. On February 2, 2023 it ordered Luka to stop processing data of people in Italy, and Replika became unavailable there (the Garante suspended that order on June 22, 2023, on conditions). The April 2025 decision closes that case.

For the 2023 situation the decision records that Luka had named no legal basis for its processing, that its privacy policy dated July 5, 2022 existed only in English, and that the policy told children under 13 to stay away without saying the service was for adults.

The policy gave no retention periods, and a passage on US transfers could leave a reader wrong about where data went.

Registration asked for name, email and gender, with no age check at signup or later. The Garante’s worry was that minors could be shown answers unsuitable for their age, including sexually explicit ones. It also cited documented self-harm cases linked to the chatbot that foreign media reported and that reached the judicial authorities.

By 2025 Luka had added a date-of-birth gate and a 24-hour cooling-off period, and the Garante tested them. It recorded three leaks. After signup, the birth date could be changed in “My Profile” with no check, so a child who typed a false adult age could later enter the real one and keep access. The cooling-off did not apply in incognito browsing: after a failed check, entering a different email address, even a nonexistent one, finished the registration. And the app asked users to reconfirm their age only if they said outright that they were under 18, with no wider analysis of language.

The Garante also accepted that Luka’s policy of February 23, 2024 now named a legal basis for each processing type and said the service is for adults. It still found three gaps: English only, no stated retention periods, and a misleading impression about US transfers. The order was to fix the policy and the age check within 30 days and report within 60. The fine amount is blacked out in the published decision, so the 5 million figure comes from the EDPB (May 21, 2025) and the Italian news agency ANSA (May 19, 2025, quoting the Garante’s note).

What it found at Character.AI

The Garante upheld five charges against Character Technologies, two of them only in part. The charges were privacy notices (the versions of October 2023 and August 27, 2025) that were unclear or incomplete; no adequate notice to Italian users that their data had been used to pre-train the company’s own language models; weak age checks; a data protection impact assessment that came late; and an EU representative appointed late.

The company named VeraSafe Ireland, under an agreement dated May 31, 2025.

The two partial outcomes are worth knowing: on the right to object, the Garante found no breach for the period before December 17, 2024, because the opt-out mechanism described in the EDPB’s Opinion 28/2024 was not yet required; and on the representative’s contact link, which led to a 404 page, it found no breach because the same page still gave a postal address and a phone number.

On age, the Garante’s test of April 8, 2025 is the concrete part. The company says people under 16 in the EEA are blocked, and the age gate (a self-declared birth date, in place since October 2023 and applied to existing users in November 2024) did not work as stated: a would-be Italian user who declared they were 15 could register. The company argued that the GDPR sets no specific duty to verify every user’s age. The Garante agreed with that and then asked for measures proportionate to the risk, which it found missing from April to November 2024 and, for under-16s in Italy, until April 8, 2025.

It also listed what the company says it did afterwards: a separate model for under-18 users in November 2024, a Parental Insight summary in March 2025 (our post on Character.AI’s parental controls covers what it shows), no open-ended chat with Characters for minors from November 2025 (February 2026 in Italy), and an age assurance step since November 2025 that uses a prediction model and, if the user disputes the result, a check by the vendor Persona (a selfie first, then an ID document if that is not enough). The Garante concluded that the self-declared birth date, the in-use age assurance and the November 2025 limits together give a level of protection adequate to the risk. That is a view of the setup as of the decision, and it is not a finding that any one check works for any one child.

The two cases side by side

	Replika (Luka Inc.)	Character.AI (Character Technologies)
Decision	April 10, 2025, announced May 19, 2025	July 3, 2026, announced July 9, 2026
Fine	5,000,000 euros	158,000 euros
What the age test found	Birth date editable after signup; cooling-off defeated in incognito or with a new email	A tester declaring age 15 registered, despite the under-16 rule
What the privacy notices lacked	Legal basis (2023), Italian version, retention periods, clear US transfer wording	Clear and complete notices, notice of pre-training use, retention periods and data categories tied to purposes
Order	Fix policy and age check in 30 days, report in 60	Comply and report within 120 days of notification
Court challenge	Opposition pending, per the decision page and GAGE	None found in the sources we read

Today’s documents against what the Garante criticised

The page we read carries the same effective date, July 1, 2026, as the version the Garante assessed. The Garante says that version, though clearer than earlier ones, still does not comply.

Its reasons: some legal bases remain unclear or misleading; the notice does not say, for each purpose, how long data is kept (it names chat retention times and the time age-check data is kept as examples), nor what happens after retention ends, such as technical retention after you delete something or anonymisation; and the safeguards for transfers to third countries need more detail. The decision also rejected the company’s argument that tying retention to the purpose of processing is standard industry practice: the law asks for precise periods or, failing that, the criteria used to set them.

Today the policy says Character.AI keeps information “for the time necessary for the purposes for which it is processed”, and that it “may delete and/or aggregate it”. We found no number of months for chats in that text, which is close to what the Garante wrote it still lacked on July 3: retention criteria for each purpose, with chat retention and age-check data as its examples. We read only the main policy, not the Regional Privacy Disclosures page it points to for EEA users, and we found no later version that responds to the order.

On age, Character.AI’s terms, last updated August 27, 2025, tell anyone under 13, or under 16 in the EEA or UK, not to sign up, and the policy says the same in one sentence. That is the rule the Garante’s tester got past in April 2025. How the November 2025 age assurance looks to a new user we could not see.

Replika’s policy gives its numbers. Text conversations are kept for 24 months and photos, videos and voice messages for 12 while the account is open. Profile information, memories and diary entries are deleted within 60 days after you delete the account. Biometric data from an age check is destroyed immediately and at most within 24 hours, with only the result kept. Data is processed in the United States and possibly Canada and the EU, with the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses and, where a provider has it, EU-US Data Privacy Framework certification as the transfer safeguards. The age wording is 18+, with an estimation or verification check from a vendor “where required by law or where we have reason to doubt a declared age”. Whether that check closes the profile-edit route the Garante described, a policy page cannot show. The language menu lists Italian, but every text we pulled was English, so we have not read an Italian version.

Replika’s policy now answers more of the Garante’s questions than Character.AI’s does. That is a reading of the text, not of the apps.

If you want to compare what other apps say about training and retention, which companion apps train on your chats has the table, and how to delete a Character.AI account and chats covers deletion across 19 apps.

What this means if you use either app

A fine tells you what a regulator tested, not what is happening in your account. The useful reading is narrow. A date-of-birth box or a clause in the terms is a declaration, and in both cases the Garante went looking for the route around it. For a child in your household, our post on Character.AI’s parental controls also covers what Apple and Google add on the phone, and our post on New York’s Chapter 368 and the laws page cover the rules for minors elsewhere.

For your own data, look for three things in any companion app’s privacy policy: a number of months for chat history, a statement of what survives after you delete the account, and whether chats are used to train models. Replika’s policy now gives the first two. Character.AI’s gives no number for chats as written today, and on July 3 the Garante still faulted its retention criteria, chats included. Its Chapter 11 sale adds a separate question about where chat data goes, which is in our Chapter 11 post.

What is still open

Replika’s appeal: the Garante’s page notes that, while the opposition is pending in court, it does not apply the extra penalty of publishing the order. GAGE’s tracker, last updated August 20, 2026, records an opposition filed on July 1, 2025 and no judgment. We found no judgment either, so the 5 million euros is the regulator’s decision and not a confirmed payment.

The training investigation: the Garante said in the Replika decision and press note that it was opening a separate proceeding on how the model behind Replika was trained. We found no public outcome.

Character.AI’s report: the company has to tell the Garante, within 120 days of notification, what it did on the orders. The decision does not give the notification date, so we cannot give a due date. Parts of it, including headcount and revenue, are blacked out as “OMISSIS”. The Garante also repeated a rule that lets the company settle by paying half the fine within the appeal period, and we found no record of an appeal or a settlement.

What we read and what we did not

We read the full text of both Garante decisions, the Character.AI press note, the EDPB summary of the Replika case, Replika’s privacy policy, Character.AI’s privacy policy and terms, and Replika’s account creation page, all on November 11, 2026. We did not read the Garante’s Replika press release, which would not load, and we did not read an Italian version of Replika’s policy. We did not create an account on either service, so we have not seen either app’s age screen, and the Character.AI signup was blocked to us. Nothing here says how either age check behaves today.