Walt Disney Co., Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Discovery on Tuesday sued a Chinese artificial intelligence firm called MiniMax for copyright infringement, alleging its AI service generates iconic characters including Darth Vader, the Minions and Wonder Woman without the studios’ permission.
“MiniMax’s bootlegging business model and defiance of U.S. copyright law are not only an attack on Plaintiffs and the hard-working creative community that brings the magic of movies to life, but are also a broader threat to the American motion picture industry,” the companies said in their complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
The entertainment companies requested that MiniMax be restrained from further infringement. They are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, as well as attorney fees and costs.
This is the latest round of copyright lawsuits that major studios have brought against AI companies over intellectual property concerns. In June, Disney and Universal Pictures sued AI firm Midjourney for copyright infringement. Earlier this month, Warner Bros. Discovery also sued Midjourney.
Shanghai-based MiniMax has a service called Hailuo AI, which is marketed as a “Hollywood studio in your pocket” and used characters including the Joker and Groot in its ads without the studios’ permission, the studios’ lawsuit said. Users can type in a text prompt requesting “Star Wars’” iconic character Yoda or DC Comics’ Superman, and Hailuo AI can pull up high quality and downloadable images or video of the character, according to the document.
“MiniMax completely disregards U.S. copyright law and treats Plaintiffs’ valuable copyrighted characters like its own,” the lawsuit said. “MiniMax’s copyright infringement is willful and brazen.”
“Given the rapid advancement in technology in the AI video generation field … it is only a matter of time until Hailuo AI can generate unauthorized, infringing videos featuring Plaintiffs’ copyrighted characters that are substantially longer, and even eventually the same duration as a movie or television program,” the lawsuit said.
MiniMax did not immediately return a request for comment.
Hollywood is grappling with significant challenges, including the threat of AI, as companies consolidate and reduce their expenses as production costs rise. Many actors and writers, still recovering from strikes that took place in 2023, are scrambling to find jobs. Some believe the growth of AI has threatened their livelihoods as tech tools can replicate iconic characters with text prompts.
While some studios have sued AI companies, others are looking for ways to partner with them. For example, Lionsgate has partnered with AI startup Runway to help with behind the scenes processes such as storyboarding.
Hollywood’s relationship with artificial intelligence is fraught, as studios balance the need to cut costs with growing concerns from actors, directors and crew members. But in China, efforts to use AI in entertainment are taking a more no-holds-barred approach.
The China Film Foundation, a nonprofit fund under the Chinese government, plans to use AI to revitalize 100 kung fu classics including “Police Story,” “Once Upon a Time in China” and “Fist of Fury,” featuring Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Bruce Lee, respectively. The foundation said it will partner with businesses including Shanghai Canxing Culture & Media Co., which will license 100 Hong Kong films to AI companies to reintroduce those movies to younger audiences globally.
Chow Yun-fat stars in director John Woo’s “A Better Tomorrow” in 1986.
(Cinema City)
The foundation said there are opportunities to use AI to tell those stories through animation, for example. There are plans to release an animated version of director John Woo’s 1986 film “A Better Tomorrow” that uses AI to “reinterpret” Woo’s “signature visual language,” according to an English transcript of the announcement.
“By empowering cultural storytelling with technology, we can breathe new life into the classics and tell China’s stories farther and louder,” said Zhang Pimin, chairman of the China Film Foundation, at the Shanghai International Film Festival earlier this month.
The project raised eyebrows among U.S. artists, many of whom are deeply wary of the use of AI in creative pursuits.
The Directors Guild of America said AI is a creative tool that should only be used to enhance the creative storytelling process and “it should never be used retroactively to distort or destroy a filmmaker’s artistic work.”
“The DGA strongly opposes the use of AI or any other technology to mutilate a film or to alter a director’s vision,” the DGA said in a statement. “The Guild has a longstanding history of opposing such alterations on issues like colorization or sanitization of films to eliminate so-called ‘objectionable content’, or other changes that fundamentally alter a film’s original style, meaning, and substance.”
The project highlights widely divergent views on AI’s potential to reshape entertainment as the two countries compete for dominance in the highly competitive AI space. In the U.S., much of the traditional entertainment industry has taken a tepid view of generative AI, due to concerns over protecting intellectual property and labor relations.
While some Hollywood studios such as Lionsgate and Blumhouse have collaborated with AI companies, others have been reluctant to announce partnerships at the risk of offending talent that have voiced concerns over how AI could be used to alter their digital likeness without adequate compensation.
But other countries like China have fewer guardrails, which has led to more experimentation of the technology by entertainment companies.
Many people in China embrace AI, with 83% feeling confident that AI systems are designed to act in the best interest of society, much higher than the U.S. where it’s 37%, according to a survey from the United Nations Development Program.
The foundation’s announcement came as a surprise to Bruce Lee Enterprises, which oversees legal usage of Lee’s likeness in creative works.
Bruce Lee’s family was “previously unaware of this development and is currently gathering information,” a spokesperson said.
Woo, in a written statement, said he hadn’t heard from the foundation about the AI remake, noting that the rights to “A Better Tomorrow” have changed hands several times.
“I wasn’t really involved in the project because I’m not very familiar with AI technology,” Woo said in a statement to The Times. “However, I’m very curious about the outcome and the effect it might have on my original film.”
David Chi, who represents the China Film Foundation’s Special Fund for Film and Urban Development, said in an interview that Chan is aware of the project and he has plans to talk with Chan’s team. A representative of Chan’s did not respond to a request for comment.
“We do need to talk … very specifically how we‘re using animated or AI existing technology, and how that would combine with his image rights and business rights,” Chi said. Chi did not have an immediate response to the DGA, Bruce Lee Enterprises and Woo’s statements.
AI is already used in China for script development, content moderation and recommendations and translation. In postproduction, AI has reduced the time to complete visual effects work from days to hours, said He Tao, an official with the National Radio and Television Administration’s research center, during remarks at the festival.
“Across government agencies, content platforms, and production institutions, the enthusiasm to adopt and integrate AI has never been stronger,” He said.
During the project’s announcement, supporters touted the opportunity AI will bring to China to further its cultural message globally and generate new work for creatives. At the same time, they touted AI’s disruption of the filmmaking process, saying the “A Better Tomorrow” remake was completed with just 30 people, significantly fewer than a typical animated project.
China is a “more brutal society in that sense,” said Eric Harwit, professor of Asian studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “If somebody loses their job because artificial intelligence is taking over, well, that’s just the cost of China’s moving forward. They don’t have that kind of regret about people losing jobs and there are less opportunities for organized protest against the Chinese government.”
A scene from the movie “Once Upon A Time In China.”
(Golden Harvest)
Hollywood guilds such as SAG-AFTRA have been outspoken about the harm AI could have on jobs and have fought for protections against AI in contracts in TV shows, films and video games. The unions have also pushed state and federal legislators to create laws that would give people more protections against deep fakes, or videos manipulated to show a person endorsing an idea or product that they don’t actually support. There is no equivalent of that in China.
“You don’t have those freestanding labor organizations, so they don’t have that kind of clout to protest against the Chinese using artificial intelligence in a way that might reduce their job opportunities or lead to layoffs in the sector,” Harwit added.
U.S. studios are also going to court to challenge the ways AI companies train their models on copyrighted materials. Earlier this month, Walt Disney Co. and Universal Pictures sued AI startup Midjourney, alleging it uses technology to generate images that copy the studios’ famous characters, including Yoda and Shrek.
In China, officials involved in the project to remaster kung fu films said they were eager to work with AI companies. They said that AI will be used to add “stunning realism” to the movies. They are planning to build “immersive viewing experiences” such as walking into a bamboo forest duel and “feeling the philosophy of movement and stillness.” In areas such as animation, new environments could be created with AI, Chi said.
“We are offering full access to our IP, platform, and adaptation rights to partners worldwide — with the goal of delivering richer, more diverse, and high-quality AI enhanced film works to global audiences,” said Tian Ming, chairman of Shanghai Canxing Culture & Media Co. in his remarks earlier this month. Tian said there is no revenue-sharing cap and it is allocating about $14 million to co-invest in selected projects and share in the returns.
The kung fu revitalization efforts will extend into other areas, including the creation of a martial arts video game.
Industry observers said China is wise to go back to its well of popular martial arts classics out of Hong Kong, which have inspired U.S. action movies for decades.
There’s also not as much risk involved for China, said Simon Pulman, a partner at law firm Pryor Cashman.
“They’ve got very little to lose by doing this,” Pulman said. “If it can potentially enhance the value of those movies, there’s very little downside for them.”
China’s film industry has grown significantly compared to decades ago, boosted by the proliferation of movie theaters, including Imax screens, in the country.
In the past, China’s box office relied heavily on U.S. productions like movies from the “Fast & Furious” and Marvel franchises, but now local movies dominate the market. The Chinese animated movie “Ne Zha 2” grossed $2.2 billion at the box office globally.
But those Chinese productions generally don’t draw large U.S. audiences when they’re released in the States. The classic martial arts movies, however, have a global following and enduring legacy.
“People love martial arts movies, because action travels,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. “It doesn’t matter what language it’s in, if you have a great action sequence and great fighting sequences.”
LONDON — Music streaming service Deezer said Friday that it will start flagging albums with AI-generated songs, part of its fight against streaming fraudsters.
Deezer, based in Paris, is grappling with a surge in music on its platform created using artificial intelligence tools it says are being wielded to earn royalties fraudulently.
The app will display an on-screen label warning about “AI-generated content” and notify listeners that some tracks on an album were created with song generators.
Deezer is a small player in music streaming, which is dominated by Spotify, Amazon and Apple, but the company said AI-generated music is an “industry-wide issue.”
It’s committed to “safeguarding the rights of artists and songwriters at a time where copyright law is being put into question in favor of training AI models,” CEO Alexis Lanternier said in a press release.
Deezer’s move underscores the disruption caused by generative AI systems, which are trained on the contents of the internet including text, images and audio available online. AI companies are facing a slew of lawsuits challenging their practice of scraping the web for such training data without paying for it.
According to an AI song detection tool that Deezer rolled out this year, 18% of songs uploaded to its platform each day, or about 20,000 tracks, are now completely AI generated. Just three months earlier, that number was 10%, Lanternier said in a recent interview.
AI has many benefits but it also “creates a lot of questions” for the music industry, Lanternier told The Associated Press. Using AI to make music is fine as long as there’s an artist behind it but the problem arises when anyone, or even a bot, can use it to make music, he said.
Music fraudsters “create tons of songs. They upload, they try to get on playlists or recommendations, and as a result they gather royalties,” he said.
Musicians can’t upload music directly to Deezer or rival platforms like Spotify or Apple Music. Music labels or digital distribution platforms can do it for artists they have contracts with, while anyone else can use a “self service” distribution company.
Fully AI-generated music still accounts for only about 0.5% of total streams on Deezer. But the company said it’s “evident” that fraud is “the primary purpose” for these songs because it suspects that as many as seven in 10 listens of an AI song are done by streaming “farms” or bots, instead of humans.
Any AI songs used for “stream manipulation” will be cut off from royalty payments, Deezer said.
AI has been a hot topic in the music industry, with debates swirling around its creative possibilities as well as concerns about its legality.
Two of the most popular AI song generators, Suno and Udio, are being sued by record companies for copyright infringement, and face allegations they exploited recorded works of artists from Chuck Berry to Mariah Carey.
Gema, a German royalty-collection group, is suing Suno in a similar case filed in Munich, accusing the service of generating songs that are “confusingly similar” to original versions by artists it represents, including “Forever Young” by Alphaville, “Daddy Cool” by Boney M and Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5.”
Major record labels are reportedly negotiating with Suno and Udio for compensation, according to news reports earlier this month.
To detect songs for tagging, Lanternier says Deezer uses the same generators used to create songs to analyze their output.
“We identify patterns because the song creates such a complex signal. There is lots of information in the song,” Lanternier said.
The AI music generators seem to be unable to produce songs without subtle but recognizable patterns, which change constantly.
“So you have to update your tool every day,” Lanternier said. “So we keep generating songs to learn, to teach our algorithm. So we’re fighting AI with AI.”
Fraudsters can earn big money through streaming. Lanternier pointed to a criminal case last year in the U.S., which authorities said was the first ever involving artificially inflated music streaming. Prosecutors charged a man with wire fraud conspiracy, accusing him of generating hundreds of thousands of AI songs and using bots to automatically stream them billions of times, earning at least $10 million.
SAN FRANCISCO — In recent years, San Francisco’s image as a welcoming place for businesses has taken a hit.
Major tech companies such as Dropbox and Salesforce reduced footprints in the city by subleasing office space, while retailers including Nordstrom and Anthropologie pulled out of downtown. Social media firm X, formerly Twitter, vacated its Mid-Market headquarters for Texas, after owner Elon Musk complained about “dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building.”
While the city remains on the defensive, one bright spot has been a boom in artificial intelligence startups.
San Francisco’s 35.4% vacancy rate in the first quarter — among the highest in the nation — is expected to drop one to three percentage points in the third quarter thanks to AI companies expanding or opening new offices in the city, according to real estate brokerage firm JLL. The last time San Francisco’s vacancy rate dropped was in the fourth quarter, when it declined 0.2% — the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to JLL.
“People wanted to count us out, and I think that was a bad bet,” said Mayor Daniel Lurie. “We’re seeing all of this because the ecosystem is better here in San Francisco than anywhere else in the world, and it’s really an exciting time.”
Five years ago, AI leases in San Francisco’s commercial real estate market were relatively sparse, with just two leases in 2020, according to JLL. But that’s since soared to 167 leases in the first quarter of 2025. The office footprint for AI companies has also surged, making up 4.8 million square feet in 2024, up from 2.6 million in 2022, JLL said.
“You need the talent base, you need the entrepreneur ecosystem, and you need the VC ecosystem,” said Alexander Quinn, senior director of economic research for JLL’s Northwest region. “So all those three things exist within the greater Bay Area, and that enables us to be the clear leader.”
AI firms are attracted to San Francisco because of the concentration of talent in the city, analysts said. The city is home to AI companies including ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Anthropic, known for the chatbot Claude, which in turn attract businesses that want to collaborate. The Bay Area is also home to universities that attract entrepreneurs and researchers, including UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and Stanford University.
OpenAI leases about 1 million square feet of space across five different locations in the city and employs roughly 2,000 people in San Francisco. The company earlier this year opened its new headquarters in Mission Bay, leasing the space from Uber.
OpenAI began as a nonprofit research lab in 2015 and the people involved found their way to San Francisco for the same reason why earlier generations of technologists and people pushing the frontier in the United States are drawn to the city, said Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s vice president of global affairs in an interview.
“It is a place where, when you put out an idea, no matter how crazy it may seem at the time, or how unorthodox it may seem … San Francisco is the city where people don’t say, ‘That’s crazy,’” Lehane said. “They say, ‘That’s a really interesting idea. Let’s see if we can do it.’”
The interior of OpenAI’s new San Francisco headquarters in the Mission Bay neighborhood. (OpenAI)
Databricks, valued at $62 billion, is also expanding in San Francisco. Databricks in March announced it will move to a larger space in the Financial District next year, boosting its office footprint to 150,000 square feet and more than doubling its San Francisco staff in the next two years. It pledged to hold its annual Data + AI Summit in the city for five more years.
The company holds 57,934 square feet at its current San Francisco office in the Embarcadero, according to CoStar, which tracks real estate trends.
“San Francisco is a real talent magnet for AI talent,” said Databricks’ co-founder and vice president of engineering Patrick Wendell. “It’s a beautiful city for people to live and work in and so we really are just following where the employees are.”
Several years ago, Wendell said his company was considering whether to expand in San Francisco. At the time, it was unclear whether people would return to offices after the pandemic, and some businesses raised concerns about safety and cleanliness of San Francisco’s streets. Wendell said his company decided to invest more in the city after getting reassurances from city leaders.
“People are seeing an administration that is focused on public safety, clean streets and creating the conditions that also says that we’re open for business,” said Lurie, who defeated incumbent mayor London Breed last November by campaigning on public safety. “We’ve said from day one, we have to create the conditions for our arts and culture, for our small businesses and for our innovators and our entrepreneurs to thrive here.”
Laurel Arvanitidis, director of business development for San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, said that the city’s policy and tax reforms have helped attract and retain businesses in recent years, including an office tax credit that gives up to a $1-million credit for businesses that are new or relocating to San Francisco.
On Thursday, Lurie announced on social media that cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is opening an office in San Francisco after leaving the city four years ago.
“We are excited to reopen an office in SF,” Coinbase Chief Executive Brian Armstrong wrote in response to the mayor’s social media post. “Still lots of work to do to improve the city (it was so badly run for many years) but your excellent work has not gone unnoticed, and we greatly appreciate it.”
Santa Clara-based Nvidia is also looking for San Francisco office space, according to a person familiar with the matter who declined to be named. The news was first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. Nvidia, which also has California offices in San Dimas and Sunnyvale, declined to comment.
“It’s because of AI that San Francisco is back,” Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said last month on the Hill & Valley Forum podcast. “Just about everybody evacuated San Francisco. Now it’s thriving again.”
But San Francisco still has challenges ahead, as companies continue to push workers to return to the office. While the street environment has improved, it will be critical for the city to keep up the progress.
Lurie said his administration inherited the largest budget deficit in the city’s history and they have to get that under control. His administration’s task is to make sure streets and public spaces are clean, safe and inviting, he said.
“We have work to do, there’s no question, but we are a city on the rise, that’s for sure,” Lurie said.
Times staff writer Roger Vincent contributed to this report.
