Disney Spent a Year Suing AI Companies Over Its Characters — Now It's Training Its Own Models on Them

Disney spent the last year in court arguing that AI companies had no right to train on its characters. On Monday, it announced it will train AI on those characters itself.

Disney and Adobe unveiled a multi-year alliance at Adobe MAX in Miami Beach, naming Adobe Disney's "Official AI Innovation Partner." Under the deal, Adobe will build custom generative AI models on its Firefly Foundry platform, trained on Disney's own characters, environments, and visual styles — models that stay private and proprietary to Disney, according to Reuters.

This is the second act of a story that started badly. In December 2025, Disney agreed to license more than 200 characters to OpenAI's Sora and planned a $1 billion investment in OpenAI. That deal fell apart in March 2026. Meanwhile, Disney is still suing Midjourney over copyright, alongside Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery, with motions in that case due November 23.

The Adobe deal is the opposite strategy: don't license your characters to someone else's model — build your own model out of them. Firefly Foundry builds a private model for a single company, trained only on content that company owns, and Adobe says the Disney models will produce "commercially safe and production-ready outputs."

It's already in use where Disney's artists actually work. Walt Disney Imagineering R&D has a sketch-to-image model that turns hand-drawn concepts into fully rendered 2D concept art, plus a custom image model that generates franchise-accurate assets. The alliance extends the work to StudioLAB at Walt Disney Studios and ESPN Edge, where joint projects are already underway. Disney also gets early access to Firefly, Premiere, and Photoshop, plus dedicated Adobe engineering staff in its production pipeline.

The framing is deliberate. Adobe's Hannah Elsakr called the models "human-centered and artist-led," and Disney's Kyle Laughlin told Reuters the tools "compress the creative process that would have taken months to now being able to do that in hours and days" — and are "in no way meant to replace" Imagineering roles.

No financial terms were disclosed, and neither company said whether Disney+ viewers will ever see AI-generated content, or how artists will be credited. But the template is now public: the studio that sued over its characters being training data just showed every other rights holder the way out of the fight — your IP, your model, no lawsuit.

— via Adobe