Disney invests $1 billion in OpenAI to bring characters of Mickey, Cinderella and Luke Skywalker

Disney is investing $1 billion in OpenAI and will bring characters such as Mickey Mouse, Cinderella and Luke Skywalker to the AI company’s Sora video generation tool, in a licensing deal that the two companies announced on Thursday. 

At the same time, Disney went after Google, demanding the tech company stop exploiting its copyrighted characters to train its AI systems. 

The OpenAI agreement makes the Walt Disney Co. the first major content licensing partner for Sora, which uses generative artificial intelligence to create short



videos.

Under the three-year licensing deal, fans will be able to use Sora to generate and share videos based on more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars characters AI video generators like Sora have wowed with their ability to quickly create realistic clips based merely on text prompts. 

But a flood of such videos on social media, including clips depicting celebrities and deceased public figures, has raised worries about “AI slop” crowding out human-created work alongside concerns about misinformation, deepfakes and copyright.