Chai AI Review

What Chai AI is

Chai AI is a social AI platform where users build and share their own characters and stories. Chai’s own figures put the library at 25 million bots across anime, RPG, horror, comfort and roleplay, served by 51,000 unique community-trained LLMs on 5,000 GPUs pushing 1.2 trillion tokens a day at over 1.4 exaflops.

Users chat, swipe through characters like a feed, build bots and publish them. Free access is ad-supported and metered in Pieces, an in-app currency spent per message. Pro removes ads, Ultra buys a larger model with better memory, and MAX unlocks Chai Studio for multi-character stories. Mobile-first on iOS and Android, with a cut-down web client.

What it costs

Two price lists exist and they disagree. The web pricing page sells Pro at $159.99 a year, billed as $13.33 a month, or $9.99 a week against a $24.99 anchor, with a 24-hour trial that converts unless cancelled. The App Store sells Premium at $9.99 weekly, $13.99 monthly or $134.99 annually, and Ultra at $19.99 weekly or $29.99 monthly, plus consumable Pieces at $2.79 for 200 and $6.99 for 500. Check which list you are on before paying.

Usage is metered rather than capped. Every message costs Pieces, with the cheapest model at one piece and better models costing more. Free users claim a daily allowance through an in-app check-in; subscribers keep unlimited messages. Image generation runs separately at $0.12 per image pay-as-you-go, or unlimited on MAX.

Free access was withdrawn outright in more than 22 countries from early 2026, including India, Pakistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa, where the app is subscription-only.

Privacy and data

• Signup via Google, Facebook or Apple, with only an email address processed. No phone number needed.
• The account can be deleted, though data is retained for up to five years afterwards.
• Conversations are stored and used for model improvement, with personal identifiers stripped first.
• Free-tier users are served ads, and install attribution data may be shared with ad partners.
• Community-published bots are visible to everyone by design.
• Data is processed in the US under Standard Contractual Clauses; EU and UK users get full GDPR rights including access, erasure and portability.
• Scale is the thing to weigh: 1.2 trillion tokens daily across 51,000 mostly community-trained models means your chats feed a far larger ecosystem than a closed single-model platform.

Privacy scores 5.0 out of 10 here.

Source: privacy policy last updated 19 May 2026.

Content and safety policy

• 18+ positioning, rated 18+ on both app stores, with age confirmation where the stores support it.
• Chai’s Safety Center states its models and real-time systems are designed to refuse sexually explicit content, self-harm content and anything sexualising minors.
• Every message is scanned in real time for self-harm signals, with crisis resources surfaced on detection.
• Users can toggle safety filters, report characters anonymously and block bots.
• Australian users can escalate unresolved complaints to the eSafety Commissioner.
• Filtering tightened materially through 2026, with long-term users reporting blanket refusals where they previously had none.

How hard the filter bites in a live session is a separate question, and one only a hands-on test can answer.