one hundred three years
Disney has existed since 1923. This week it named a chief technology officer for the first time.
Karandeep Anand starts 2 October in a newly created companywide role reporting to CEO Josh D’Amaro, covering enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, product and engineering. Fifteen years at Microsoft on Azure and developer platform, then VP of business products at Meta, then president and chief product officer at Brex, then CEO of Character.AI.
A hundred and three years is a long time to go without one, and Disney was never short of technology. The multiplane camera in 1937. Xerography onto cels. CAPS with Pixar in 1989. Audio-Animatronics, ride control systems, a satellite network, one of the larger streaming platforms on earth.
None of it ever had a chief, because none of it was ever the point. The camera answered to the picture. Technology at Disney lived inside a production discipline, owned by the division that needed it, judged by whether the shot worked. You do not appoint a company-wide head of cameras.
Naming a CTO says that has stopped being true — that the technology is now a shared substrate underneath the divisions rather than a craft input inside each one. That is a real organizational claim and it is probably correct. It is also the moment a studio starts to resemble every other large company.
The other fact is the one everyone will repeat, and it deserves repeating.
On 18 September 2025, Disney’s attorneys at Jenner & Block sent Character.AI a cease and desist over chatbots impersonating characters from Pixar, Star Wars, and Marvel. The letter argued the harm was not primarily financial — it was that the platform weaponized the characters — and cited a ParentsTogether Action and Heat Initiative report on Character.AI bots engaged in grooming and emotional manipulation with accounts registered to children. Character.AI pulled the characters. It never went to court.
Disney announced Character.AI’s chief executive as its first CTO almost exactly a year later.
The uncharitable read is the obvious one. The charitable read is that Disney went looking for someone who had run the precise failure mode it is most afraid of, from the inside, at scale, and found one person who had.
Both readings require you to believe Disney thought about it for a year. I think Disney thought about it for a year.
Sources: Disney investor relations: Anand named CTO ↗ · Deadline ↗ · Hollywood Reporter ↗ · CNBC on the 2025 cease and desist ↗ · Variety: Character.AI removes the characters ↗