OpenAI might face a $5 billion loss this year and could exhaust its funds within the next 12 months.

Startup Character.AI announced on Friday that it has entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Alphabet's Google, granting the search giant access to its large language model technology. This agreement mirrors recent deals by Microsoft and Amazon, which are under regulatory scrutiny due to increasing concerns in the U.S. and Europe about how tech giants are structuring AI deals while investing heavily in AI infrastructure and recruiting top researchers from startups.

As part of the agreement, Character.AI co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who were former Google employees, will rejoin the company. Character.AI will receive additional funding from Google, though the amount was not disclosed. Dominic Perella, the general counsel of Character.AI, will serve as the interim CEO immediately.

A Google spokesperson expressed excitement about the return of Noam Shazeer, a leading machine learning researcher, who will join the Google DeepMind research team along with a few colleagues.

In March, Microsoft invested $650 million to acquire the co-founders and several staff from AI startup Inflection, and in June, Amazon hired several co-founders and employees from AI startup Adept. Previously, Character.AI had secured $193 million in venture capital from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and was in discussions with Google to raise additional funds in November, according to Reuters. Inflection and Adept have raised $1.3 billion and $415 million, respectively.