Disney partners with OpenAI while hitting Google with cease and desist

Disney has already spent a good portion of 2025 going to bat against various AI companies; in July, it sued Midjourney, alleging it was a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.” This morning’s news comes at almost the exact moment that Disney hit Google with a cease and desist over its own AI generator, per Deadline. The Mouse House alleges that Google has been engaging in “willful infringement is especially alarming because it is leveraging its dominance in generative AI and across multiple other markets to make its infringing AI Services as widely available as possible.” 

Following the announcement, Iger and Altman appeared on CNBC, where the Disney CEO shared a rather fatalistic view of the situation. “If it’s going to happen regardless, then we’d rather participate in the rather dramatic growth, rather than just watching it happen and essentially being disrupted by it,” Iger said, per The Hollywood Reporter. “So we think this is actually a way for us to be part of these developments, as opposed to be harmed by them.”

The staying power of these developments is increasingly unclear, however. Within the past month, The Financial Times has reported that OpenAI has saddled its data center partners with nearly $100 billion in debt while keeping its own balance sheet clean. Last week, The Washington Post reported that the tech company was on track to lose $140 million between 2024 and 2029. The outlet suggests that if the whole AI boom turns out to be an AI bubble, OpenAI would have a hard time surviving the pop.