Pro-AICompany

The Walt Disney Company

Entertainment Conglomerate

Hollywood’s biggest IP holder is “bullish” on AI and uses it gladly — AI-powered park droids with Nvidia, a $1B OpenAI courtship, licensed character generation — while suing any AI company that touches its catalog without paying.

Company Organization

Wikipedia

In their words

We are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity.

— Horacio Gutierrez, Variety, 2025

Bringing together Disney’s iconic stories and characters with OpenAI’s groundbreaking technology puts imagination and creativity directly into the hands of Disney fans.

— Robert A. Iger, Disney press release, 2025

Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism.

— Disney–NBCUniversal complaint, 2025

Biography

Founded in 1923, The Walt Disney Company owns the deepest character library in entertainment — Disney animation, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars — and has taken a two-handed position on generative AI: one hand builds with it, the other sues over it. Chief legal officer Horacio Gutierrez put the doctrine plainly: Disney is “bullish on the promise of AI technology” — as a tool it controls.

Gladly using it themselves

Disney’s own AI adoption is broad and enthusiastic. In March 2025, Disney Research joined Nvidia and Google DeepMind to build Newton, an open-source physics engine trained to drive its Star Wars-inspired BDX droids — unveiled live at Nvidia’s GTC keynote and headed for the parks from 2026. In December 2025 it went further than any studio: a three-year licensing agreement putting 200+ Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars characters inside OpenAI’s Sora app, with curated AI-generated videos to stream on Disney+, Disney deploying ChatGPT and OpenAI APIs across the company, and a planned $1 billion equity investment. CEO Bob Iger framed it as putting “imagination and creativity directly into the hands of Disney fans.” The Sora bet dissolved in March 2026 when OpenAI abruptly shut the app down — but the direction of travel was unmistakably chosen.

Suing everyone else

What Disney will not tolerate is other companies’ AI using its catalog for free. In June 2025, Disney and NBCUniversal filed the first major studio lawsuit against an AI company, branding Midjourney “the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism.” It then joined Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal in suing Chinese video-AI firm MiniMax, and its cease-and-desist made Character.AI strip Disney characters within days.

The through-line is not hostility to AI but ownership of its upside: Disney polices unlicensed generation with the largest legal war chest in Hollywood precisely because it intends to sell — and use — licensed generation itself. Where courts land on Midjourney’s fair-use defense will decide how much of that control any studio actually has.