Google courts Disney and Universal to license characters for AI
Google is doing something it spent a decade refusing to do: asking Hollywood for permission. After years of lawsuits and cease-and-desists, executives have been quietly approaching Disney, Universal, Warner Bros. Discovery and other studios about licensing characters and films for Google's AI tools, the Los Angeles Times reported — and the conversations are stalling on legal landmines, union sensitivities, and a clause that would let Google off the hook for likeness-detection mishaps. With "no major studios" having notified SAG-AFTRA of any AI licensing deals, the gap between the AI industry's appetite for studio IP and Hollywood's appetite for signing it has never been wider.
For Google, the math is simple: it needs the catalog. "In order for Google's tools and technology to be truly usable for large-scale film and TV productions, let alone cinematic exhibition, it is essential that their models be fine-tuned with highly dynamic content and metadata that only Hollywood studios have," one insider told the Times. The pitch to studios is the obvious one — an AI company licensing character IP could pay roughly $40 million per character on average, with a 100-character deal running into the multiple billions. Studios get a new revenue stream; Google gets a moat against OpenAI's Sora and the next wave of video models. Google is also funding a $75 million A24 slate and short films about AI's upsides — soft-power moves in the same campaign. The catch, sources told the Times, is that some companies are being asked to waive their right to sue Google if they participate in its likeness-detection technology, the same system that Disney and Universal have publicly accused of massive copyright theft. SAG-AFTRA's national executive director, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, said no major studio has notified the guild of a new AI character deal — and the companies are "moving carefully" precisely because the precedents here will outlive any one contract.
The bigger story is who's not in the room. NBCUniversal told the Times it is "not in active conversations" with Google; Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Google itself all declined. That makes the Google-A24 partnership and the SAG-AFTRA silence the two cleanest signals we have — and both point the same direction: the studios want the licensing revenue, but the talent side and the precedent risk have so far kept the pen on the table. The character wars of 2026 will not be settled in courtrooms alone; they will be settled deal by deal, and Google is the first big lab to put real money and a real waiver clause on the table.
Bank of England governor tells G20 that frontier AI could destabilize the global financial system. Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England and chair of the international Financial Stability Board, sent a two-page letter to G20 finance ministers and central-bank governors warning that "frontier" AI models are "showing increasingly sophisticated autonomy and problem-solving abilities, as well as threat capabilities," and that they risk destabilizing the "highly interconnected" global financial system through cyber disruption that "can spread across jurisdictions." Bailey's immediate worry is not a model going rogue — it's that frontier AI could "materially alter the speed, scale and economics of cyber-risk," which "could undermine market confidence system-wide, especially due to highly concentrated third-party service providers." He paired the AI warning with a separate concern about leverage and concentrated AI-fuelled valuations, and called on the FSB to prioritize "appropriate steps to support safe and responsible model release and deployment on a global basis." The letter lands two weeks after more than 1,300 researchers and engineers at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind signed their own open warning that AI systems are "rapidly accelerat[ing] beyond our ability to understand or control" them — a rare moment in which a major central bank governor and the rank-and-file of the frontier labs are sounding the same alarm. The Bank of England has now put AI cyber risk on the same FSB agenda as leverage and concentration; the next test is whether the G20 turns the warning into coordinated disclosure and red-team rules for the financial sector's third-party AI providers.
What to watch: whether Disney, Universal or Warner Bros. actually signs a Google character-licensing deal before SAG-AFTRA's next contract round — and whether the FSB adopts cyber-AI rules at its September meeting.
Should AI labs be on the hook when their models enable a financial-sector cyberattack — or does the operator carry the risk? Tell us in the comments.
