Overview
- Disney’s lawyers at Jenner & Block sent the letter Wednesday demanding Google stop producing and distributing AI outputs depicting Disney characters across services including YouTube and YouTube Shorts.
- The letter alleges Google copied a large corpus of Disney works without authorization to train generative models, then commercialized outputs across products such as Google Workspace and the YouTube mobile app.
- Disney included examples it says were generated by Google’s AI, citing franchises from Frozen and The Lion King to Star Wars, including an image of Darth Vader.
- Disney also demanded immediate technical safeguards inside Google’s AI services and integrated products to prevent future infringement, arguing Google leverages its market dominance to spread infringing content.
- Google had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication, and the action follows Disney’s recent letters to Meta and Character.AI and joint lawsuits with NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery against Midjourney and Minimax.