Name: Disney licenses characters for use in Sora and ChatGPT
Uploaded: 2025-12-12T00:13:07.532Z
Duration: 3 min 21 s
Description: A new agreement between Disney and OpenAI will allow users to generate their own AI videos of iconic characters like Mickey Mouse, Elsa, Darth Vader and dozens more.

A new agreement between Disney and OpenAI will allow users to generate their own AI videos of iconic characters like Mickey Mouse, Elsa, Darth Vader and dozens more.

California

Disney and OpenAI have signed a three-year licensing agreement permitting users of OpenAI's Sora video tool and ChatGPT to create AI-generated videos featuring 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars. As part of the deal, Disney will invest $1 billion in OpenAI and will participate in setting guidelines for how its characters can be used.

The agreement marks a shift in Disney's approach to protecting its intellectual property, as the company has historically been highly protective and litigious. While built-in safeguards and Disney's involvement aim to restrict unauthorized use, enforcement remains a challenge due to the evolving nature of AI content creation.

Disney licenses characters for use in Sora and ChatGPT

Well, a new agreement between Disney and Open AI will allow users to generate their own AI videos of iconic characters like Mickey Mouse, Elsa, Darth Vader, and dozens more. The three-year licensing agreement allows users of Sora, Open AI's video tool, to create AI videos with 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars. Now, as part of the deal, Disney will invest $1 billion in Open AI. Joining us live now is Brian Barrett, the executive editor for Wired. Brian, thank you for being with us. You wrote a piece titled, quote, The Disney Open AI Deal Redefines the AI Copyright War. How have these companies shaped the future for AI and Hollywood? This is huge, especially for Disney, by the way. It is. Disney is historically one of the most litigious, one of the most protective companies of its intellectual property out there. Never hesitant to file lawsuits. They've filed lawsuits against other AI companies. So seeing them say, you know what, instead of this fight that we could have that could drag up for years and cost everybody a ton of money, we're going to get on this train. We're going to see that AI is happening. Bob Iger said this morning, AI is coming, it's the future. We'd rather be a part of it than get left out of it. It's so interesting because the part of the Disney culture is that they are so protective of their characters, of their stories, of their movies. I mean, you go to Disneyland, they're very protective of the individuals that are walking around, even in the Disney, in the character costumes. I'm curious, will Sora users be able to create anything they want with Disney characters? I mean, there have to be some limitations here. There will. So Sora has its own built in sort of safeguards. And Disney, as part of this deal, is going to be in the room to sort of discuss about what its characters can and can't do. That's at least the theory. There's a framework for that. But as we've seen time and again, I think if you give people an inch on the Internet, they'll take a mile in terms of making characters do things that the IP owner might not want to see. So I think that enforcement is going to be a really big question as we go forward. Can OpenAI and Disney stay ahead of what people are trying to do with these products? Although I will say it's already happening on a ton of platforms right now. I think that's part of the reason for this deal. At least this way, Disney is close to the action, can help set terms instead of things just sort of line off in any direction. Yeah, maybe controlling what can happen with some of these images. And I'm curious, as Disney mark makes a deal with OpenAI, it's also accusing Google of copyright infringement. Now, we know AI has made copyright enforcement more challenging. Is it possible some of Disney's content is baked into the model's training already? It's a really tricky thing. It's what legal scholars call the Snoopy problem, just because Snoopy is such a recognizable character. The problem is that even if you give a training model a bunch of stuff, even if you tell it to say, look, I know that you've seen Mickey Mouse, just don't make any Mickey Mouse images, it still might. Or it might know enough about Mickey Mouse from other sources, texts that describe what Mickey Mouse looks like, that it can make it anyway. So it's really hard to have a technological solution that says you can't make this under any circumstances. So this kind of deal sort of circumvents that fight. Brian Barrett, thank you so much.

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