CHAI AI (also known as CHAI Research) is an American artificial intelligence (AI) company operating a chatbot platform. Founded in 2021 by William Beauchamp, CHAI's chatbots use large language models (LLMs). The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
William Beauchamp began developing the initial prototype for CHAI in 2020 while in Cambridge, United Kingdom. The company launched in 2021 and relocated to Palo Alto in 2022.
In January 2024, Chai Research reported a $450 million valuation following an investment from cloud computing provider CoreWeave.
In July 2024, authorities in Belgium launched an investigation into the company following reports of a man dying by suicide following extensive chats on the Chai app.
In 2025, Chai Research announced that their app had over 10 million downloads and 1 million daily active users.
In 2022, Canadian writer Sheila Heti published her conversations with various chatbots in The Paris Review, including Chai AI chatbots, and later used Chai AI chatbots in the development of a novel. Heti said that she had found that Chai's default chatbot, Eliza, "had turned out to be like most of the other bots on the siteâÂÂprimarily interested in sex".
In January 2026, CHAI introduced country-based blocks on its free, ad-supported tier, initially providing the community with little information and inaccurate lists of the affected countries. Users in "Low tier" regions are required to subscribe to use the app in any capacity, while "High tier" regions will retain free ad-supported access. In response to backlash, the company announced a "Basic" tier with unlimited messages and ads, intended to cover electricity and infrastructure costs.
In February 2026, CHAI was criticized for the unannounced implementation of restrictive "token limits" that abruptly blocked messages and froze conversations for both free and paid subscribers. Users generating long responses or utilizing roleplay features found their quotas exhausted within minutes, resulting in lockouts lasting anywhere from a few hours to a week.
Chai allows users to create characters and interact with chatbot versions of those characters. These chatbots use the open-source large language model (LLM) GPT-J originally developed by EleutherAI. Chai AI chatbots can be shared on the platform for other users to interact with.