Disney will invest $1 billion in OpenAI and give the rights to characters for its AI service

The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI have entered into an agreement under which Disney will invest $1 billion in the artificial intelligence developer and license the use of its characters in Sora, a generative short video platform. This is stated in a statement from OpenAI.

Disney in exchange for the investment will receive securities of OpenAI, as well as the right to purchase an additional stake in the creator of ChatGPT. It is not specified how many shares of OpenAI will be received by Disney and at what price. In October, OpenAI was valued at $500 billion, making it the world's most valuable private company.

The agreement between OpenAI and Disney is for three years. Under its terms, Sora will be able to create short videos based on user requests, using a catalog of more than 200 characters from Disney itself, the Marvel superhero universe, Pixar Animation Studios and Star Wars - including costumes, props, transportation and iconic locations. The license does not include the appearance and voices of the actors and therefore applies only to animated characters, characters wearing Musks, and animal characters and other creatures.

In addition, the intellectual rights extend to the ChatGPT Images image creation service.

Disney will be the first major content licensing partner for Sora, OpenAI has announced. The partnership "brings together leaders in the creative industry and innovation, opening up new opportunities for creative storytelling," it claimed. Disney will also become a major client of OpenAI, using its technology to develop new products, including features for the Disney+ streaming service.

The OpenAI and Disney agreement is the largest partnership to date between an AI company and a media conglomerate, notes the Financial Times.

The issue of intellectual property rights and artificial intelligence is one of the most pressing issues in the AI boom. OpenAI and its competitors have already been the subject of lawsuits from a number of publishers who accuse them of using protected materials to train models, the FT writes. The deal with Disney does not give OpenAI the right to use the studio's intellectual property to develop its neural networks, the newspaper said.

Disney shares jumped 2.3% to $111.36 in after-hours trading in New York. This is the maximum for a month.

Disney shares are virtually unchanged in price in 2025: they're now worth 0.4% less than they were in early January. But analysts are mostly advising them to "buy": they have assigned 20 Buy ratings and four Overweight ratings versus five Hold ("hold") and one Sell ("sell"), MarketWatch shows.

Disney isn't the only strategic alliance for OpenAI. In September 2025, the company and Nvidia announced a partnership under which the chipmaker will invest up to $100 billion to develop OpenAI's infrastructure and supply capacity for training AI models. Back in July, OpenAI and IT giant Oracle signed a five-year, $300 billion cloud computing deal.

In October, OpenAI announced the completion of its restructuring. This process resulted in the creation of a for-profit organization called OpenAI Group PBC. Microsoft, OpenAI's largest investor, received approximately 27% of its shares.

The completion of OpenAI's restructuring allows the ChatGPT developer to launch an IPO that could take place as early as 2027 and become one of the largest in history, sources told The Wall Street Journal. The company's management responded by saying that a public offering of OpenAI shares is "not on the agenda" in the near term.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor