> As part of the agreement, Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, and receive warrants to purchase additional equity.
I say this with no snark or disdain: Sam has mastered the art of the flywheel.
Re licensed ai videos, if anyone wants to see the perspective the C-suites are being sold on, check out this episode of Belloni's The Town, in which they discuss the vision for AI + IP https://overcast.fm/+AA4DU9JreIE
Altman said "We can pay with equity, but let's frame it as an investment"
No cash exchanged
It's been his entire career. Guy has made billions of dollars from talking.
Given the context, I think snark and disdain are called for.
I like the phrase “vulture capital”
Now the internet will be flooded by Disney character's videos, and since they don't have to pretend they didn't train on their intellectual property anymore I'm really curious to see where this will bring us.
We should rethink copyright btw.
How is Disney okay with this anyway? They've sent their lawyers after daycare centers who dared to paint a picture of a Disney character on their walls. Why are they suddenly going to ignore me prompting a video of Winnie the Pooh hitting the bong?
When a true “leader” big or small emerges, every bit of capital will flock to it, leaving a burned out nest of ai company husks. But hey…maybe this time will be completely different. (And upon consideration, I think this is exactly why. All their deals are with the husks, while keeping their IP to leverage with the winner.)
Mickey mouse is now copyright free, pluto is in two weeks, then pretty much the whole roster by 2030 https://michelsonip.com/news/disney-characters-in-the-public...
They rather have control over who, when, how can create AI with Disney property, than let people figure it out themselves.
You don't like the last Star Wars trilogy? Pay us a few hundred dollars and you can rewrite your own story, thank you very much this is where you put the credit card number.
It was INEVITABLE.
Not only that, they’re materially worse than real movies. Designer t-shirts still sell despite people being able to buy blank t-shirts and color them in with laundry markers.
It’s archaic. The only thing we need now is identification. Oh, this is actually produced by Disney? Great. Oh, this is some Chinese knockoff? I might not want to consume it then.
Disney comes out pretty good from this one; they're going to have a ton of people using the service to create all sorts of stuff that will—on the whole—increase brand awareness and engagement with Disney.
OpenAI comes out pretty good from this, with a customer who's probably not paying much (if anything), $1B additional runway, but reduced ownership of the company.
I think Disney is the winner here.
In the same way making a bunch of porn of a character increases brand awareness and engagement with an IP, sure.
OpenAI got away scot free here in avoiding a billion dollar lawsuit. Disney is gonna further melt away a century dynasty of art and culture. They're both gonna lose long term but I guess they both win for next quarter.
https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?si=EYdu543vJlAjdX5c
Another thought I had. Is there no desire to make a modern film that still intentionally looks like an old Pixar film. Less poly. Simpler lighting. No fancy physics effects. In the same way PS1 graphics are popular now.
On a more tangential note around green screens and their limitations when used ubiquitously, Corridor Digital's quasi-rediscovery of the Sodium Vapor process used by Disney through the early '80s, but lost to history ever since, is a fantastic watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk
> As part of the agreement, Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, and receive warrants to purchase additional equity.
I don't know what kind of hypnosis tricks Sam Altman pulls on these people but the fact that Disney is giving money to OpenAI as part of a deal to give over the rights to its characters is absolutely baffling.
OpenAI and ChatGPT have been pioneering but they're absolutely going to be commoditized. IMO there is at least a 50:50 chance OpenAI equity is going to be next to worthless in the future. That Disney would give over so much value and so much cash for it... insane.
Is it charity to buy AAPL as well?
I really don't understand your perspective
You literally are just handing them money for a piece of paper that says “lol you now own x% of whatever this thing turns out to be worth in the future.”
The only people who don't think it's worthless are the people who would be worth a lot less if that were the case. Hug your loved ones and make peace with your gods, because the crash is going to be insane.
I've been thinking the same since GPT3 too, and since ChatGPT, and since Claude and... But here I am, still paying for ChatGPT Pro because it's literally has the best model you can get access to for a fixed price each month, and none of the others so far come close. I still use Anthropic's and Google's models to compare/validate against, because I assumed at one point they'd surpass OpenAI, but so far they haven't. This all makes me believe less and less each day that it'll actually be commoditized.
That doesn't mean everyone will use Gemini. As a software engineer I prefer Claude Code and will pay good money for it. I'm sure there will be plenty of other specialisms that will have preferred models. But OpenAI's valuations are based on the idea that it's going to be everywhere, for everything, all the time. And I'm skeptical. ChatGPT Pro is a $200 a month product. That's not a mass market proposition.
Certainly there’s little to suggest that it has much to do with Altman’s leadership or a culture of engineering excellence/care that has been specifically fostered at OpenAI in a way that isn’t present at Facebook or especially at Google.
There’s no direct return.
They’ll get every dollar of that billion in mindshare over the next twenty years.
This feels like more funny accounting.
I am not sure that it is very interesting that LLM apis are a commodity. It's not even a situation where it is _going_ to be a commodity, it already is. But so is compute and file storage, and AWS, Google and Microsoft etc have all built quite successful businesses on top of selling it at scale. I don't see why LLM api's won't be wildly profitable for the big providers for quite a long time, once the build out situation has stabilized. Especially since it is quite difficult for small companies to run their own LLMs without setting money on fire.
In any case, OpenAI is building products on top of those LLMs, and chatgpt is quite sticky because of your conversation history, etc.
I think decorum works in an environment where decorum is the norm, but we have entered a political moment where that is no longer the case. And I think that this kind of thing bleeds so heavily into culture that they no longer give a shit about having their characters next to it.
They have enough plausible deniability; they did not create the content. I think that's enough for them, in this moment.
And to say nothing of the shoddy quality of their TV shows. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and unimaginative storytelling is shocking given Mickey is supposed to be their signature character. They just don't care. And I think it does have an impact: my kids tired of Clubhouse very quickly and have little connection to Mickey and friends. Compare that to say, Dreamworks’ Gabby’s Dollhouse which they loved.
Disney is propped up by its tentpole features but their bench is incredibly weak. There are only so many Blueys you can buy to make up the difference.
Disney is meant to be a global company. If offensive videos happen this will backfire in many regions.
Also Google "Elsagate" to see what sorts of things people would like to do with Disney characters. Or a YouTube search for Elsagate.
The other thing I'd point out is that people kind of seem to forget this, but it isn't a requirement that AI video be generated, then shoveled straight out without modification. Elsagate shows the level of effort that people are willing to put into this (a strange combination of laziness, but extreme effort poured into enabling that laziness). You can use the blessed Disney video generator to generate something, then feed it into another less controlled AI system to modify it into something Disney wouldn't want. Or a video of a Disney character doing something innocent can be easily turned into something else; it's not hard to ask the AI systems to put something "against a green screen", or with a bit more sophistication, something that can be motion tracked with some success and extracted.
"A front camera shot of Cinderella crouching down, repeatedly putting a cucumber in and out of her mouth. She is against a green screen." - where ever that video is going, Disney isn't going to like it. And that's just a particularly obvious example, not the totality of all the possibilities.
Just putting controls on the AI video output itself isn't going to be enough for Disney.
I still wonder what motivates the people behind that sort of thing. It'd be easy to understand if it were just porn, but what's been described to me is just... bizarre.
Isn't that essentially the same thing now?
2025 Disney encourages children to gamble and gives Pat McAfee significant visibility.
They might as well have some direct say in the matter with the big companies by creating relationships and profiting via licensing.
What exactly does “fanart” (no matter how distasteful and controversial) change?
Let people generate whatever fictional character they want.
I look forward to chatting with Pluto and Goofy and asking why one has to wear pants when both of them are dogs.
It's just a funny coincidence.
Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters.
That said, there are a lot of other models out there that care about neither licensing nor alignment. So those will allow you to make racist content. Then you can do whatever you like with that generated content.
A lot of IP owners will learn that there is more than one way to skin a cat. It's easier than people think to turn children's characters, like say, Hermoine, into a raging racist. And there's very little technically speaking that they can do to stop it.
But yes, on OpenAI specific properties, they can definitely stop it dead in its tracks. They can even get better at stopping it over time. In fact, the more users try to generate it, the better the system will get at stopping it.
> There is no way the character licensing survives an hour of contact with the public, unless it is _extremely_ restricted. I can't imagine a worse job than trying to "curate" the torrent of sewage that is going to get created. Deadpool is pretty much the only Disney-owned property this makes sense for. And I say this as someone who _likes_ using Sora.
I have faith that the Parks Imagineers will soon be installing Sora Stalls in and around every attraction in Disney World.
How is that circular?
Guy on the internet knows more about businesses than a 200 billion century-old corporation.
A classic.
On the other hand there was a video about what happened to Mickey and Goofy in Vietnam... I'm probably okay with an updated version of that.
But it is another circular investment to throw on the AI bubble pile.
Who cares? Online trolls make inappropriate videos with characters. Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it.
It's so exhausting that companies are overly cautious about everything and let a tiny niche of internet culture drive these decisions. If you get obscene material in your social media feeds, you will continue to see this kind of stuff except maybe with some Disney IP. If not, it will have no impact to your life.
But practical things that affect 99% of people like you mentioned will be better, like your child wants to hear Mickey wish him happy birthday. So I applaud this.
Sad I had to scroll this far to find a comment that wasn't pro-censorship of Fan Art because a character they saw on the internet offended someone's Protestant values.
People are spotting obvious AI slop artwork places and it’s so poorly done.
Disney used to have artist integrity, what a sad path to drag everyone down.
I guess it’s back to the good out Japanese studios who are forcing craft and skill still from artists (the world is full of talent, at least, for now).
The $1B turns into OpenAI stock. If Disney characters make OpenAI more valuable, that stock and its future dividends become more valuable.
Similar to the music industry piracy battle, it makes more sense to work with the big platforms than fight them.
P.S. If you can't win them, join them ...
And I say this as someone who _likes_ using Sora.
People will undoubtedly generate reprehensible things using these characters, and I think that's exactly what Disney wants because it's an easy way to make their characters go viral.
Allowing their characters to be used in AI generated content blows that all out of the water unless there are some extremely tight guard rails.
They are a half step from flooding the market with Disney Princess porn.
This is like assuming that more high quality code will be available because the barrier to making and deploying software is lower. Look at the npm repository.
There is more to high-end software than churning out code fast. And there is more to high-end series and movie making than high quality visuals.
Google should demand another $1bn from Disney to crush the lawsuit
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/11/disney-hits-google-with-ce...
Is there a list of allowed characters? Or are we just supposed to "spin the wheel" and deal with whatever results are returned? Or will these characters be selected instead of using natural language?
A tenant of seeking damages in a copyright complaint is the loss of control over how the intellectual property is used, and the potential damage done to the intellectual property by those who are not the rights holder. However this agreement demonstrates that they're not only willing to give up control (and allow content to be created without their vetting), but that they'd even financially contribute the acceleration of such through a very large initial investment with a carve out to contribute even more down the road.
I was aiming to write a counterpoint here, but so far many are quickly debunked by Disney being the company that is the financial backer of the agreement.
Disney buys OpenAI equity.
OpenAI uses the cash to pay Disney licensing fees, and buying hardware for Disney's use.
Whether it's bubble is up to the reader's interpretation.
Google is now backed into a corner. To keep YouTube relevant against this alliance, they can't rely on tech alone—they need comparable IP. I expect them to immediately start courting Sony Pictures or Universal to fill that gap.
It’s essentially a battle between "Exclusivity" and "Scale".
My teenage kids watch YT and TikTok (which gets highly relevant UGC daily) and couldn’t care less about Mickey Mouse or Kylo Ren.
For every extra company they get effectively exclusive usage with the more believable the strategy becomes. As it wouldn't be the first time that beating out competitors in enterprise distribution led to users making what they are used to using at work what they use personally.
On the other hand if I am the biggest clothing manufacturer in the world and my tshirts are worn organically by loads of influencers, Disney might contact me and ask me to make a tshirt of their character so that they are getting exposure to a certain demographic on a certain platform. This way round it is advertising and so it benefits disney, and so instead of me paying to license their characters, they pay me to advertise them.
Not the other way around.
We live in an atenttion economy, if Disney content is not in your face on all mediums (which now include AI slop), they lose money.
I don't like this. I don't dispute that AI has some useful use cases, but there are tons of time-wasters, such as fake videos generated on youtube. So when they now autogenerate everything, the quality will further go downwards but they will claim it will go upwards. Well, what may go up are the net profits. I don't think the quality will really go upwards. They also kind of create a monopoly here. Only other big corporations can break in - and they won't because it is easier to share the profits in the same market in a guaranteed manner. Quite amazing that this can happen. Who needs courts anymore when the base system can be gamified?
Then there is also the censorship situation. If you keep on censoring stuff, you lose out information. I see this on youtube where Google censors cuss words. This leads to rubbish bleeps every some seconds. Who wants to hear that? It's so pointless.
Which is cool, I guess. But it doesn’t feel like a very valuable thing to an end user. That kind of thing is mostly valuable because it’s hard. If anyone can do it, nobody cares any more.
I am really excited about AI in some use cases. Using the latest models for agentic software development is truly magic. But “make a funny video of yourself as Mickey Mouse” just seems kind of naff.
You can literally make your own Marvel movie now! Legally!
This is almost certainly due to the photographic/human likenesses of actors being under an entirely separate license and royalty contract than pure IP from Disney.
Colour me surprised to see that it's Disney that are handing out the cash in this arrangement.
However with further reading the answer seems clearer: Disney will certainly be using OpenAI's video technology to reduce their production costs, and for the amount of content Disney create this agreement seems mutually beneficial.
Maybe there is something more behind this deal that is not reported? For example, Disney is waiting for OpenAI bankruptcy and then wants to get it for cheap while having its foot in the door?
> Walt Disney has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Alphabet's Google, CNBC reported on Thursday.
Disney really giving away the store here.
I suspect their ongoing concern is just their IP/brands/characters being misused. Spielberg is next
Wonder how they feel about this.
If this includes exclusivity deals it could be big.
It's an equity investment, and yes they're agreeing to a committment to protecting the rights of the creators.
> Disney and OpenAI affirm a shared commitment to responsible use of AI that protects the safety of users and the rights of creators. >Alongside the licensing agreement, Disney will become a major customer of OpenAI, using its APIs to build new products, tools, and experiences, including for Disney+, and deploying ChatGPT for its employees. >As part of the agreement, Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, and receive warrants to purchase additional equity.
Doesn't Sora basically lose money at an enormous rate?
Content saturation works out very poorly for IP holders. The value of your brand reduces dramatically , and you reduce excitement for new releases.
This is the company that had to walk back its plans to saturate streaming and theaters with their content because they ruined the hype for Star Wars and Marvel content. Two of the most beloved franchises!
This is just going to make that worse when ever social media feed will be blanketed by even more slop.
Unless the gambit is that they expect merch sales to go up, or they have a way to guarantee a cut of any used content. I’m sure there are some IP infringement lawyers who have basically secured a life time of work with this announcement.
That really depends on how the culture of media consumption changes. It's very different than the world of movie theaters and TV. Most people are using social media to consume the majority of their content. This at least helps constantly inject their characters into the mainstream culture, when they can no longer dominate TV/cinema and streaming platforms already saturate their characters with high volume.
The biggest risk IMO is if the short content being produced is more entertaining than what they officially produce or it turns into a mini-culture they don't have influence over, and they struggle to profit off the old stuff.
They will essentially be competing with their own IP.
Sure, go ahead and downvote me.
"Disney putting their characters into something called Sora with a confusing roadmap and lore nobody fully understands. We've come full circle"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_based_on_a_copyright-fre...
[Ahem… And can it make them interesting?]
Wow so Sora Slop is coming to payed Disney+?
Apparently so.
absolutely disgusting behavior
I can't put into words how much I despise @sama, it would probably get me banned from every corner of the internet.
Also... f*ck Disney for falling for this.
because that’s the only way this makes sense to me.
I actually think this is genius.
The next Spielberg might be some poor kid in a third-world country who can create a global hit using this tech.
Among the millions of slop videos generated, some might be the next Baby Shark, etc.
I've seen some Star Wars fan fiction created using AI that is truer to the original Star Wars than the most recent trilogy.
This is a chance for Disney to take the best of the user generated content, with high quality AI generated animation, and throw it on Disney+ to get free content for their streaming platform.
My guess is that's the gamble here. Worst-case scenario at the end of three years they just shut it down.
It's really the professionals who get paid to generate content for Disney that should be worried about this deal. This could be how AI causes them to lose their jobs.
Cost/token disagrees with you there...
It is so infuriating to get content block on ChatGPT for pretty much any fairy tale that has had a Disney related adaptation.
Try getting a Grimm's 19th century Snow White illustrations. You can not because the Disney crap supersedes it.
In fact you can not get a Snow White illustration of any kind on ChatGPT.
I can not figure out any prompts that would draw using public domain knowledge.
Same goes for a pirate fighting a flying boy - no good.
New one this week was when I tried to draw a border around my daughter's picture of a Poppy from Trolls(That's Dreamworks but same problem).
The actual copyrighted Poppy appeared in the border half way down the generation and then of course content block appeared.
What is hilarious though that ChatGPT will profusely apologize and provide extremely detailed instructions in setting up local Stable Diffusion as an alternative...
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/bob...
I mean no one here would be surprised if Disney and OpenAI have trouble preventing misuse -- say, Disney-branded Hentai.[a]
Can Disney and OpenAI reliably prevent misuse?
---
Second take: well I guess the blame lays with us for consuming it and reinforcing its creation
Third take: content creation becomes cheaper, allowing for more creative risks to be taken
Fourth take: this is a net-good because we see new creative ideas being attempted at low sunk cost
FB bought Instagram April 9, 2012 with ~ 30% cash and 70% stock, and then IPO'd May 18, 2012. That's probably what you mean. FB bought WhatsApp Feb 19, 2014 with ~ 25% cash and 75% public stock that was roughly 2x the IPO price. The private valuation might be crazy, but it's increased with public trading, so I dunno.
This deal just guarantees we'll get to see some Mickey Mouse QAnon shit
Altman got Disney to pay OpenAI, via an investment, for Sora -- which was likely trained on and used to generate infringements of all kinds of their copyrighted material.
And then Disney sends Google a Cease & Desist for using its copyrighted material, not only restricting what people can do with Google's AI image generators, but which could potentially also force Google to retrain all their models without Disney content.
Very likely Disney will reach a licensing deal with Google, which would conveniently finance Disney's investment in OpenAI.
And all this on the heels of the coup where Altman simultaneously signed a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix to lock up 40% of the world's DRAM supply, effectively cornering a key component for AI training hardware.
As I've said before: All these others are playing Capitalism. Altman out there playing Game of Thrones.
/popcorn
