Character.AI Models Explained (2026): PipSqueak 3, ShortSqueak, DeepSqueak and LongSqueak
Character.AI’s models are called chat styles: named versions of its language model that you pick inside a chat. Since 28 September 2026 there are four current ones. PipSqueak 3 and ShortSqueak are free. DeepSqueak and LongSqueak are premium. The older PipSqueak 2 and Rawr have moved to a Legacy menu.
That line-up is five days old as we write this, and most of what you will find when you search still describes the one before it. Character.AI’s own help centre has not fully caught up either. So this page does three things: it tells you which style to use, it shows which plan gets which, and it keeps a dated history of every style Character.AI has named, so that “Roar”, “Nyan”, “Soft Launch” and “the old model” all have an answer.
Everything here comes from Character.AI’s own blog and help centre, read on 3 October 2026. A note on what we did not do: we have not run a controlled test of these styles against each other. The descriptions of what each style is good at are Character.AI’s. Where we add our own reading, we say so.
The Short Answer
| You want | Use | Plan needed |
|---|---|---|
| General roleplay, the best free option | PipSqueak 3 | Free |
| Quick, casual chats with short replies | ShortSqueak | Free |
| The strongest model Character.AI has | DeepSqueak | c.ai+ (unlimited) or c.ai lite (daily amount) |
| The other premium style | LongSqueak | c.ai+ (unlimited) or c.ai lite (daily amount) |
| The style you were used to before 28 September | PipSqueak 2 or Rawr, in the Legacy menu | Free, for now |
| Fewer refusals | No style does this | The content rules are the same on every plan |
The Current Chat Styles
Here is each current style, with Character.AI’s own words about it.
| Chat style | Tier | What Character.AI says |
|---|---|---|
| PipSqueak 3 | Free | ”Your new go-to for general roleplay. Compared to PipSqueak 2, it’s noticeably smarter, writes more interesting replies, keeps better track of your chat, and has fewer slip-ups in text formatting and responses.” |
| ShortSqueak | Free | ”Your new style for quick, casual chats. ShortSqueak has texting energy: short replies, quick banter, casual roleplay.” |
| DeepSqueak | Premium | ”our most powerful model”; “our strongest chat style, available with (c.ai+)“ |
| LongSqueak | Premium | Listed as a premium chat style beside DeepSqueak. The pages we could read do not describe it further. |
Three details from the announcement of 28 September matter in practice.
- New chats start on PipSqueak 3. Existing chats do not change. Character.AI’s post says “any existing chats stay on the chat style you’ve chosen”. So an old chat can still be on PipSqueak 2 while a new one, with the same character, is on PipSqueak 3. If two chats feel different, check the style first.
- The free styles have no special limits. The post says PipSqueak 3 and ShortSqueak “are free for everyone, with no special limits once they’re rolled out”.
- The rollout was staged. Subscribers got both styles on 28 September. For free users, the post said the styles “start rolling out later today, and everyone will have both within the next few days”. If you do not see them yet, that is the reason.
ShortSqueak deserves one more line, because of who it is for. Many long-time users miss the short, fast replies of early Character.AI. The company says so itself: “If you’ve been asking for us to bring back the feel of some of our early (c.ai) chat styles, you’ll love ShortSqueak.” Its own description of the problem is exact: “No five-paragraph monologues when all you said was ‘hey.’” If your complaint about the current models is length, try ShortSqueak before anything else.
About LongSqueak we can say little. The name suggests longer replies, but Character.AI’s public pages do not say so in what we could read, and we will not guess. What they do say is that it went through testing “with our trusted testers and community members” before launch, and that it is premium.
Which Plan Gets Which Model
| Chat style | Free | c.ai lite | c.ai+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| PipSqueak 3 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| ShortSqueak | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| DeepSqueak | — | Daily amount | Unlimited |
| LongSqueak | — | Daily amount | Unlimited |
| Legacy styles (PipSqueak 2, Rawr) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Style Control on PipSqueak 3 and ShortSqueak | — | — | ✓ |
In the US, c.ai lite is $4.99 a month or $2.49 a week, and c.ai+ is $9.99 a month. Prices vary by country. Our c.ai+ guide covers what else each plan includes.
How the lite plan’s daily amount works. Character.AI’s help centre explains it clearly:
- You get “a daily amount of messages on premium chat styles, such as DeepSqueak and LongSqueak”, and you can spend them in any chat.
- “A bar in the Chat Styles menu fills down as you use premium messages.”
- When they run out, “your chat continues on the free chat styles”, in the same chat with the same history. The amount resets the next day.
- You cannot buy more for the day. The help centre’s answer to that question is “No.”
Character.AI does not publish how many messages the daily amount is.
Style Control. The announcement says c.ai+ subscribers “get Style Control with PipSqueak 3 and ShortSqueak”. The post does not explain what Style Control does, so we will not describe it. The same sentence says both new styles “are fully compatible with Lorebook”.
One thing the help centre has not updated. On 3 October 2026, the plan comparison table in Character.AI’s “About (c.ai) lite” article still lists the basic chat styles as PipSqueak 2 and PipSqueak 2 Rawr, and says a lite chat that runs out of premium messages continues on “the free chat styles, such as PipSqueak 2”. The blog post of 28 September says it “switches back to PipSqueak 3”. The two pages were written a few days apart, on either side of the launch. We take the blog post as the current one, because it is the announcement of the change.
Which Model Should You Use?
This is our reading of Character.AI’s descriptions, not a test result.
For a story or a roleplay with some length: PipSqueak 3. It is the default for a reason. Every claim Character.AI makes for it is about the things long chats depend on: tracking the chat, fewer formatting mistakes, more interesting replies.
For quick, casual chats: ShortSqueak. If you send one line and want one line back, this is the style built for that.
If you subscribe: DeepSqueak for the scenes that matter. Character.AI calls it its most powerful model. In April 2026 it said it was fixing “reliability issues” on DeepSqueak, including “gibberish and cutoff responses”. So it is the strongest style, and also one the company has had to stabilise.
On lite: spend the daily amount where it counts. The amount is limited and you cannot top it up. Use a free style for small talk and switch to a premium one for the important scene. When the meter runs out mid-chat, the model reading your chat changes, and that can feel like the character changed. It did not forget; a different model is now writing.
Stay off the Legacy styles for anything long. Character.AI’s help centre says its newest styles “provide the best chat experience while supporting our latest features, like Lorebooks and advanced memory”. Legacy styles are on their way out, and you would be building a long chat on a model that will be removed.
How to Change the Model
You change the chat style inside a chat, in what Character.AI calls the Chat Styles menu or the style picker. The choice belongs to that chat. Older styles sit in a Legacy menu in the same place.
We are not giving exact button positions. The picker has changed more than once in the last year, the web and the app differ, and we could not open it during our check on 3 October. A wrong click path is worse than none.
Two rules that do not depend on the layout:
- A style is set per chat. Changing it in one chat does not change your others.
- Starting a new chat gives you the current default, which is PipSqueak 3. If you preferred the older style, you have to pick it from the Legacy menu again.
Which Model Has the Best Memory?
People ask this a lot, and the honest answer is that memory on Character.AI is mostly a plan feature, not a model feature. The number of pins, the detailed Memory Usage bar, Facts and advanced Lorebooks all come from your plan. A stronger model with nothing pinned still loses the details that were never pinned.
What Character.AI says about the styles themselves:
- PipSqueak 3 “keeps better track of your chat” than PipSqueak 2.
- PipSqueak 2 was already described, in April 2026, as “better at holding onto details you’ve established earlier in a chat” than the first PipSqueak.
- DeepSqueak is “our strongest chat style”, and Character.AI’s May 2026 memory post said its memory upgrades “run on our latest generation of chat styles”.
- Legacy styles may not support the newest memory features at all.
So the order for long chats is simple: a current style, not a Legacy one; then use the memory tools your plan gives you. Our guide to Character.AI memory explains pins, Story Memory and the Memory Usage bar.
The Legacy Menu: Where Old Models Go
Character.AI created a help article called “Legacy Menu” on 23 September 2026, a few days before PipSqueak 3 arrived. It explains the new rule for old styles:
“As we release newer Chat Styles, older ones move to the Legacy menu. For now, you can still select and use them from there.”
And it is direct about the future. To the question “Will Legacy Chat Styles go away?”, the answer is: “Yes, eventually. We’ll retire Legacy Chat Styles over time, and we’ll let you know before a Chat Style you use is removed.”
That is a fair arrangement, and better than a model disappearing overnight. It also means that a Legacy style is borrowed time. The 28 September post names two styles in the Legacy menu: PipSqueak 2 and Rawr. Character.AI’s pages do not list what else is in it.
A History of Character.AI’s Models
Search results for Character.AI’s models are confusing because the names have changed about once a season. Here is the whole sequence, from Character.AI’s own posts.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| January 2025 | Model Picker announced: for the first time, users can choose a model |
| 18 February 2025 | Chat Styles launch with three: Meow (“Quick wits, faster words”, for users over 18), Roar (“Mix of speed & smarts”, for everyone) and Nyan (“Smart and more thoughtful”, for c.ai+) |
| March 2025 | Pawly, an experimental style “with smarter multilingual capabilities” |
| April 2025 | Goro gets “significant updates”; Dynamic arrives, a style that picks the best option for each conversation by itself |
| May 2025 | Soft Launch, “a limited chat style for users over 18” |
| July–August 2025 | PipSqueak begins rolling out: “DeepSqueak’s lil’ cousin and our most expensive FREE model yet”. DeepSqueak already exists as the premium model. Soft Launch becomes permanent for 18+ users |
| September 2025 | PipSqueak rolls out to more users |
| December 2025 | Changes to how DeepSqueak is served: faster replies and bug fixes for c.ai+ users |
| 14 April 2026 | PipSqueak 2 announced, for c.ai+ first and free users in early May. DeepSqueak reliability fixes. Character.AI says “DeepSqueak 2 is training now” |
| 23 September 2026 | The Legacy Menu help article is created |
| 28 September 2026 | PipSqueak 3 and ShortSqueak launch as free styles; PipSqueak 2 and Rawr move to the Legacy menu; c.ai lite launches |
A few things this table answers.
“Roar”, “Nyan” and “Meow” were the original three styles of February 2025. If a guide tells you to pick Roar, it is more than a year old.
“Soft Launch” was a style for adult users, launched in May 2025 and made permanent that August.
“Experimental models” is how Character.AI itself described styles such as Pawly. It warned from the first day that styles “may change as we iterate and improve them”.
“DeepSqueak 2” was said to be in training in April 2026. As of 3 October 2026, Character.AI has not announced its release.
We could not confirm from Character.AI’s public pages which of the 2025 styles can still be selected today.
What Are the Models Built On?
“What model does Character.AI use” has a short official answer and a longer, more interesting one.
The short one is in the help centre: Character.AI “uses a combination of proprietary and open-source models”.
The longer one is in its blog. In August 2025 Character.AI wrote that it had spent months on “tech that lets us transform open-source models into high-EQ, high-engagement Character models”, and that PipSqueak was one of the results. Its community update the same month says the team “worked hard to refine our open-source models and the result is PipSqueak”. A month earlier it had published its own training framework, built, in its words, “to explore better ways of fine-tuning DeepSeek V3”.
Its help centre also has a page of third-party software notices, which lists open models the company uses under licence. Among the text models named there are several from the Qwen family, Mistral Small and Llama 3.1.
Here is the limit of what that tells you. Character.AI does not say which open model is behind which chat style. The notices page lists models the company uses somewhere in its service; that includes safety filters, image tools and other jobs. So nobody outside the company can honestly tell you that PipSqueak 3 “is” a particular open model, and we will not.
Three practical consequences are solid, though.
- You cannot download a chat style or run it locally. They are Character.AI’s tuned versions, served from its own computers.
- A modified app cannot unlock a premium style. The style runs on Character.AI’s side and is tied to your plan.
- If you want to choose the actual model yourself, that is what other platforms are for. See the best LLM for roleplay and our list of Character.AI alternatives.
What No Model Changes
Three complaints send people looking for a different model, and a different style will not fix any of them.
- Refusals. Character.AI’s content rules apply on every plan and every style. Paying does not change them.
- Forgetting in a long chat. That is the memory budget. Use pins and Story Memory, on any style.
- A character that acts out of character. That is usually the character’s own definition. Our bot creation guide covers what the model actually reads.
If the app itself is misbehaving, with blank replies, errors or slow mode, see Character.AI not working. And if your feeling is simply that it used to be better, why Character.AI feels worse looks at what changed.
Our Recommendation
- Free users: PipSqueak 3 for stories, ShortSqueak for quick chats. Try both; they cost nothing.
- If you miss how Character.AI used to feel, try ShortSqueak first, before going to the Legacy menu.
- Do not build a long chat on a Legacy style. It will be retired.
- On lite, save the premium messages for the scenes that matter.
- On c.ai+, use DeepSqueak, and try LongSqueak to see which you prefer.
- When a chat suddenly feels different, check the style before you blame the character.
- Ignore any guide that names Roar, Nyan, Meow or Goro as the choice. It describes 2025.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Character.AI model?
For most free users it is PipSqueak 3, the default for new chats since 28 September 2026. Character.AI says it is smarter than PipSqueak 2, writes more interesting replies and keeps better track of the chat. For quick, casual chats with short replies, use ShortSqueak, which is also free. If you subscribe, DeepSqueak is the one Character.AI calls its most powerful model.
Which Character.AI models are free?
PipSqueak 3 and ShortSqueak. Character.AI says both are free for everyone, with no special limits once the rollout is complete. The older PipSqueak 2 and Rawr styles are still selectable from the Legacy menu. DeepSqueak and LongSqueak are premium: unlimited on c.ai+, and a daily amount on c.ai lite.
How do I change the model on Character.AI?
Open a chat and use the Chat Styles menu, which Character.AI also calls the style picker. Choosing a style changes it for that chat. New chats start on PipSqueak 3, and existing chats stay on the style you chose before. Older styles are in a Legacy menu inside the same picker.
Which Character.AI model has the best memory?
Memory on Character.AI depends more on your plan than on the model, because pins, the Memory Usage bar, Facts and advanced Lorebooks are plan features. Among the styles, Character.AI says PipSqueak 3 keeps better track of your chat than PipSqueak 2, and calls DeepSqueak its strongest. Avoid Legacy styles for long chats: Character.AI says its newest styles are the ones that support its latest features, such as Lorebooks and advanced memory.
What happened to PipSqueak 2 on Character.AI?
It moved to the Legacy menu on 28 September 2026, together with Rawr, when PipSqueak 3 became the default. You can still select it for now. Character.AI says Legacy styles will be retired over time and that it will tell you before a style you use is removed.
What happened to Roar, Nyan and Meow on Character.AI?
They were the first three chat styles, launched on 18 February 2025: Meow for speed, Roar as the balanced option and Nyan as the more thoughtful one for subscribers. Character.AI has replaced its line-up several times since then. Its help centre says older styles move to the Legacy menu and are retired over time. We could not confirm from its public pages which of the 2025 styles are still selectable today.
What AI model does Character.AI use?
Its own chat styles, which it builds partly on open-source models. Character.AI’s help centre says it uses a combination of proprietary and open-source models, and its blog says PipSqueak came from refining open-source models. It does not publish which open-source model is behind which chat style. You cannot download the chat styles or run them on your own computer.
Why did my Character.AI chat change model?
The usual cause is the c.ai lite plan. Lite gives a daily amount of premium messages on DeepSqueak and LongSqueak, and when that is used up the same chat continues on a free style until the next day. A rollout can also change things: since 28 September 2026 new chats start on PipSqueak 3, while existing chats keep the style they had.
The current chat styles, their descriptions, the rollout and Style Control are from Character.AI’s blog post of 28 September 2026. The plan table, the daily amount on lite and the Legacy menu rules are from Character.AI’s help centre, read on 3 October 2026 (US prices; yours may differ). The history is from Character.AI’s blog posts and community updates of January 2025 to September 2026, and the notes on open-source models from its blog and its third-party software notices. We could not open the style picker during our check, so nothing on this page describes its layout. The advice on which style to use is our reading of Character.AI’s own descriptions; we have not run a controlled comparison of the styles.
Character.AI is a trademark of Character Technologies, Inc. Arcanum is independent and not affiliated with it. Nominative use only.