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Disney hits Google with cease-and-desist claiming ‘massive’ copyright infringement

Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google on Wednesday, alleging that the tech giant has infringed on its copyrights, Variety reports.

Disney is accusing the tech giant of copyright infringement on a “massive scale,” claiming it has used AI models and services to commercially distribute unauthorized images and videos, according to the letter seen by Variety.

“Google operates as a virtual vending machine, capable of reproducing, rendering, and distributing copies of Disney’s valuable library of copyrighted characters and other works on a mass scale,” the letter reads. “And compounding Google’s blatant infringement, many of the infringing images generated by Google’s AI Services are branded with Google’s Gemini logo, falsely implying that Google’s exploitation of Disney’s intellectual property is authorized and endorsed by Disney.”

The letter alleges that Google’s AI systems infringe characters from “Frozen,” “The Lion King,” “Moana,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Deadpool,” and more.

Google didn’t confirm or deny Disney’s allegations but did say it will “engage” with the company. “We have a longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship with Disney, and will continue to engage with them. More generally, we use public data from the open web to build our AI and have built additional innovative copyright controls like Google-extended and Content ID for YouTube, which give sites and copyright holders control over their content,” a spokesperson said.

Disney’s move comes the same day that it signed a $1 billion, three-year deal with OpenAI that will bring its iconic characters to the company’s Sora AI video generator.

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Ford and SK On are ending their US battery joint venture

Four years ago, Ford and South Korean battery maker SK On struck a deal to form a joint venture and spend $11.4 billion to build factories in Tennessee and Kentucky that would produce batteries for the next generation of electric F-Series trucks.

The factories live on; the joint venture will not.

SK On, a subsidiary of SK Innovation, said Thursday it reached an agreement with Ford to end the joint venture. The two companies will divide the assets: Ford will take ownership and operation of the twin battery plants in Kentucky, while SK On will operate the factory at the massive BlueOval SK campus in Tennessee.

SK On said it will maintain a strategic partnership with Ford centered on the Tennessee plant, according to Bloomberg.

When reached for comment, a Ford spokesperson told TechCrunch the company was aware of SK’s disclosure and had nothing further to share at this time.

The joint venture was created when the industry was investing billions of dollars to ramp up electric vehicle production. While EV sales have risen over the past several years, demand has not kept up with the industry’s lofty projections. The end of the federal EV tax credit has also dampened the pace of sales.

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TIME names ‘Architects of AI’ its Person of the Year

Each December, TIME Magazine names a person of the year — someone who has most influenced the news and world, for good or ill. Last year, TIME chose President Donald Trump for the second time. The year before that, it was Taylor Swift, who many claimed saved the economy from a recession with her Eras Tour. In 1938, the magazine chose Adolf Hitler. 

This year, TIME has chosen to bestow its award on not just one person, but a group of people: the so-called “Architects of AI,” comprising the CEOs shaping the global AI race from the U.S. With AI on everyone’s minds, embodying hope for a small minority and economic anxiety for a majority, per recent Edelman data, this tracks.

“For decades, humankind steeled itself for the rise of thinking machines,” the article reads. “Leaders striving to develop the technology, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, warned that the pursuit of its powers could create unforeseen catastrophe […] This year, the debate about how to wield AI responsibly gave way to a sprint to deploy it as fast as possible.”

Based on one of TIME’s two cover photos, some of those people appear to be Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Tesla’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, AMD’s Lisa Su, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, and World Labs’ Fei-Fei Li — all individuals who raced “both beside and against each other.” 

TIME writes that these individuals, through their multibillion-dollar bets on “one of the biggest physical infrastructure projects of all time,” have reshaped government policy, turned up the heat on geopolitical competition, and pushed AI adoption forward. 

This is the story of how AI changed our world in 2025, in new and exciting and sometimes frightening ways. It is the story of how Huang and other tech titans grabbed the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods… AI emerged as arguably the most consequential tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons.

TIME only announced the news on Thursday morning, but images of the cover photo were leaked on prediction market Polymarket on Wednesday evening.

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