Name: Disney and OpenAI reach three-year licensing agreement
Uploaded: 2025-12-11T15:04:45.328Z
Duration: 3 min 9 s
Description: Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI and receive warrants to purchase additional equity.

Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI and receive warrants to purchase additional equity.

San Francisco

The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI have announced a three-year licensing agreement that will allow more than 200 Disney characters to be featured on OpenAI's Sora short-form video platform. As part of the deal, Disney will invest $1 billion in OpenAI at its current valuation and receive warrants that could increase its stake in the company over time.

The agreement enables Sora users to generate short videos with Disney characters, with some content also available on Disney+. In a related move, Disney has issued a cease and desist letter to Google, alleging unauthorized use of its characters for AI model training and commercial exploitation on Google's short-form video platform.

Disney and OpenAI reach three-year licensing agreement

Good morning and welcome to Squawk on the Street. We're going to start our show this morning with some breaking news from the Walt Disney Company and OpenAI, the two reaching what they're calling a landmark agreement to bring more than 200 characters to the OpenAI Sora platform, the short-term, short-form, excuse me, video platform. Of course, it has become so incredibly popular, in part so popular that OpenAI needs ever-expanding amounts of compute, which will get us a little later to Oracle, of course, a key part of our story this morning. But as for this deal, there you're seeing it on the screen, Sora's going to be able to generate short-user prompted videos, and they're going to be able to use these Disney characters, Disney characters that, of course, have been embroiled, and we'll get to this in a minute, in any number of disputes between the company and those who are using its IP without paying for it. Not the case here, a licensing agreement between the two companies, and as well, an exchange of economics. Disney going to invest a billion dollars in OpenAI at its current valuation, is what I'm being told, as well as receiving warrants over the course of this three-year deal. There, I don't have any transparency or details in terms of where those warrants would be struck, but obviously, they would allow Disney to increase its potential stake in OpenAI over time. But guys, interesting to see Disney making a move like this, saying, this is where the technology is going. We don't want to be left out, in a sense, despite the fact that I'm sure you could imagine that in some way it threatens certain parts, creators and things like that. By the way, I should point out that as part of the deal, certain short-form videos that are created with Disney characters will be able to be used on Disney+, so sort of giving a platform to those who create things as well with Sora. Now again, it is a short-form video. It does not include the voice of the actors behind any of these characters that we know so well. But, you know, when you start thinking about it, I, of course, always start off with the likes of Mickey Mouse, but, I mean, you know, you think of Marvel, you think of Star Wars, The Simpsons. I mean, you go on and on with just the volume of characters available here for people who want to use them. Another piece of news this morning as well to share involving Disney, not OpenAI, is that Disney has issued a cease and desist letter to Google for its use on its short-form video platform of all of these characters, essentially what they say in part in the letter, is copying a large corpus of their copyrighted works without authorization to train and develop generative artificial intelligence models and services by using AI models and services to commercially exploit and distribute copies of protected works, and they're violating Disney's copyright. So interesting timing here in terms of those two, not coincidence perhaps, deal with OpenAI, a cease and desist letter to its chief competitor, Google.

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