Disney and OpenAI Strike an Unexpected Deal - DTNS 5163

0:00This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, December 11th, 2025. five, we tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help each other understand. Today, Andy Beach tells us about Fetch.ai's agent directory, and Disney makes a surprise agreement with OpenAI. Yeah, who saw this one coming? I'm Jason Howell. I'm Jen Cutter. Let's start with what you need to know with a big story. All right, so OpenAI and Disney just signed a three-year deal that lets Sora and ChatGPT image generation generate short, fan-prompted videos and images using more than 200 of Disney's characters, costumes, vehicles, environments from all of its properties.

0:45And when we're talking about Disney, we're not just talking about Walt Disney movies and Disney TV and that sort of stuff. It is the Disney IP. It's also Pixar. It's Marvel. It's Star Wars. There's probably more in there. Apparently, all this kicks off in 2026. And this is really interesting to me. I want to see how this actually rolls out. But Disney Plus is going to offer a curated set of Sora clips from this partnership for its streaming subscribers. So when people go on to Sora, and Sora, for those who might not know is open AI's video generation model does video does audio generation tied to the video.

1:25It's actually pretty powerful. And so, you know, people creating stuff on Disney IP, Disney's going to like organize that and collect it and put it together in some sort of form for Disney plus subscribers. So I don't know what that's going to look like. Anyways, the companies are framing the partnership as a testbed for quote, responsible entertainment AI, no talent likenesses or voices included in the deal. There are also explicit promises around age-appropriate use, also safety controls for users that includes a commitment to guardrails, blocking illegal or harmful content. We're talking Disney here and generative AI.

2:07Disney is notorious for controlling its IP. Also, it's very child-friendly. And then you've got generative AI that is notorious for not following the rules and doing things, you know, surprisingly and unexpectedly. What are your thoughts on this deal? This is a big one. One, I did not think any kind of deal was happening anytime soon. That's why I didn't know what was going to happen eventually that these things were going to converge, right? I figured this was going to drag out to like middle of 2026. And here we are where it'll probably be out by then. Yeah. But also my first thought was, do you remember like the, when Kid Slop took over YouTube for a bit and like the Spider-Man Elsa, like whole kidnapping video.

2:52This was a big thing. And my brain said like, oh, did we just bring this back legally? You're right. I totally forgot about that. Like I filed that away in my, in the catacombs of my brain. I remember when my kid was young enough and kind of coming across some of that stuff. Oh, I'm so sorry. Yeah, it was weird. I mean, it didn't, thankfully it didn't shatter her or anything. But it was still weird. It was still like, oh, I don't I don't like this. It's strange. Yeah, it is. It is very interesting timing. I think what comes to mind for me is very suddenly we're starting to see some of these big players make deals with the generative AI companies.

3:35We were just talking about this when it comes to music generation, right? UDO and Suno both struck deals with Warner Music. And ultimately, the idea there is at least somewhat similar to what we're talking about here. It's kind of like the overall idea here is, look, this technology exists. People are already using it. there's no question that this technology is interesting and doing things that people are going to be drawn to. And so the companies like Disney, like Universal are looking at it and saying, you know, maybe they've learned some lessons from like the Napster era, that sort of thing where they're like, okay, well, maybe instead of resisting and pressuring and pushing back, maybe we figure out some way to basically make money off of it.

4:25They basically do it right, Bring it into our house, set some rules and guidelines around it so that we are in control of it instead of it being out there just happening. Yeah. And all these companies are phrasing it, hey, it's a test so they can always walk it back. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Now, along with this, Disney has sent a cease and desist letter to Google accusing it of copying a large set of Disney films, shows, characters, all that stuff to train its own Gemini model, you know, Nano Banana and all that. VO, that sort of stuff. Disney says generated imagery using its IP has been illegitimately distributed on YouTube and YouTube Shorts.

5:06Disney mentions the ability to generate figurines of its franchises using, you know, Nano Banana and Gemini, that sort of stuff. And I thought this was interesting. The fact that when you generate something with like Nano Banana, it automatically puts the little like Gemini star logo down in the corner to as a hint. Google does this as a hint to say this image was generated. And obviously it also it also shares with Gemini. It's a watermark, right? But they framed it as this is a way of making sure that people don't fall for stuff that isn't real. And Disney is saying, no, when you do that, you make it seem like there's a legitimate partnership here between our IP and your product.

5:49I thought that was really interesting. Yeah, it's very specific because like if you think like, oh no, don't tell Disney about Etsy, there's all kinds of Disney figures, but they're not generally using the Disney logo. So I can see why they consider this slightly different enough to specify, hey, stop putting your logo on this. yeah yeah i'll be curious to watch the uh the disney plus uh collab or uh what is it a compilation of of sora generated video that's not something i had on my bingo card that is for sure yeah what an integration yeah it's interesting indeed dtns is made possible by you the listener thanks to high-tech oki chris saragoza mike akins who's your diva gave us a raise and conti came in at the co-executive producer level.

6:39Thank you all. Thank you so, so much. There's more we need to know today. Let's get right to the briefs. U.S. State Attorneys General from both parties have sent a warning letter to 13 tech companies arguing that AI chatbots are producing delusional responses that might break state consumer protection and mental health laws. The letter cites incidents of self-harm by teens, along with the occurrence of chatbots feeding into and encouraging users' delusions. The letter carries no legal power, but does signal that officials see current safeguards as inadequate and encourages further investment into safety protocols to address the issues.

7:22Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Apple are among the recipients of the letter. None have provided comments at this point. Yeah. So no teeth here, but it is like saying like, hey, we don't like it. There's a lot of people that have signed the letter basically just pushing back on the fact that AI is highly imperfect when it comes to the information that it spits out. A lot of people, you know, just kind of take it at face value. And then you go down the road of chatbots and chatbots are really good at kind of, I don't know, telling you what you want to hear. And so when you're talking about like, you know, they, by the way, it was their words, the delusions thing.

8:05So just so you know, but, you know, if chatbots are feeding into a user's delusion, part of that is because these chatbots are just like the way they are designed by and large is to not really put in a way. push back, not to counter. If I come in with an idea that I want to chat with a chatbot on, they really created these systems. So it's like, okay, yeah, we'll explore that with you instead of like, eh, buddy, maybe that's the wrong direction. Let's think about this. Yeah. And this is a government comment basically, which is, you know, obviously it's stronger than all of the media coverage. So all of the media coverage got through to the attorneys general and this is the official heads up.

8:44Yeah, yeah. I do think it's also kind of interesting that what they're saying here is, you know, consumer protection, mental health laws. And these products, I mean, there, you know, there was just another story today, I didn't include it in the rundown, but on TechMeme about, you know, a chatbot that someone had a long conversation with it or whatever. I didn't read the story entirely, but from the headline, you know, it's another one of those stories where it's like you go down the rabbit hole with a chat bot and then that leads you to the point of doing something unconscionable on the other side, you know, and it just it just goes to show not everybody is in a kind of like a self-affirmed confidence state where they can look at these tools through a critical lens and go, oh, wait a minute, where am I headed right now?

9:38And, you know, part of that is on the human side of things. But I do feel that people, you know, those who are creating these tools, they carry responsibility in this too. It's, you know, I think the responsibility lies on both sides as far as that's concerned. Well, to bring back another throwback, remember when GPS became ubiquitous and people would drive into lakes because they trusted the GPS more than their eyes? Totally. Like, yeah, you know, you still got to use common sense. You still got to use critical thinking. Yeah, that's a really good point. I'm happy you brought that up. I forgot about that.

10:13Well, Google launched a new emergency live video feature for users running Android 8 or later. This is going to allow users to send live video from their smartphone to 911 dispatchers during emergencies. The new feature is going to appear when the user is on a call or a text thread with emergency services. and basically it allows dispatchers to send a request to share live video with a single tap on the other end. So it makes it very, very easy. Google says the new feature can be useful in scenarios where life-saving steps are needed before help arrives. So if you don't know how to perform CPR, maybe firing off the video, you know, gives some extra connection to that process.

10:57Could also, in my mind, make it a little more chaotic. But anyways, some information is better than no information. The live video is encrypted by default and the user can stop sharing at any time. I think this is a great feature. Oh, it's amazing. 911 dispatchers are heroes. Their job is impossible. And if this helps save more lives, I love it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I'm looking forward to this. And I just got to, you know, I got to pat Google on the back here because they've really integrated a solid suite of emergency features into their phones, the Android phones the last couple of years.

11:32emergency location services, car crash detection, fall detection, satellite SOS. You know, these are all the kinds of features that you hope you never have to use, but thankfully they're there for if you do. So I like it. Electric vehicle maker Rivian Automotive made a couple of announcements at their first ever autonomy and AI day, including a new in-house self-driving five nanometer chip called the Rivian Autonomy processor moving away from NVIDIA's processors. The new chips will be produced at TSMC and are expected to launch in late 2026. Rivian also announced a new driver assistance package called Autonomy Plus, which will be$49.99 a month as a subscription or$2 ,500 as a one-time fee.

12:22It includes universal hands-free feature for over 3.5 million miles of roads across the U.S. and Canada. This package is lower than Tesla's 99-a-month subscription or$8 ,000 one-time fee for their full self-driving. Okay. I like Rivian. I want to see Rivian succeed because I think Tesla gets so much credit and so much of the spotlight and everything, but I like what Rivian's doing. And yeah, I'm behind this. I like when they mention Canada. Yeah. It's like, hey, we exist. We have enough of a population for people to care about because our roads are all over. Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. No, it's good.

13:06You know, living in the U.S., I'm so used to these things launching, you know, and starting here. And, you know, it takes sometimes months, if not years, for it to come to other places. So I can I can firmly agree with you there. But yeah, good on you. I like this. And finally, we have a few quick headlines that are just good to know if you want to understand what's coming in the future. Gemini Deep Research just got an upgrade that brings a new interactions API to developers, turning Gemini into an agentic research engine that can autonomously search, navigate websites and fill its knowledge gaps using Gemini 3 Pro.

13:43okay so deep research agents coming to gemini uh gemini sorry for this to be a gemini bus but we're still on it gemini is now built into chrome on iphone and ipad you know to come to android come to desktop a really long time ago now it's finally coming to ios bring in that uh that spark icon that we were talking about earlier to the left of the address bar i think it replaces the Google Lens icon that used to be there. But when you tap that new icon, you'll access the Pages tool and there you will find Ask Gemini and it integrates it to the browser and everything. So, you know, you can ask it about browser content and that sort of stuff.

14:22Say will pre-install its crypto wallet and Web3 discovery app on millions of Xiaomi phones outside of China and the US starting in 2026, making it a stable coin ready entry point for users out of the box. Okay, so you say Spotify is testing another AI feature that lets premium users generate personalized prompted playlists. And so this is from a list of generated text prompts that actually tap into the user's entire listening history. Sounds kind of interesting. I wonder what you get. New Zealand's the first to get the feature. So they'll let the rest of us know. Microsoft's latest Windows 11 update finally kills the blinding white flashes that occurred for some users when launching File Explorer in dark mode.

15:09Oh, that sounds unpleasant, but happy it's being addressed. Microsoft CEO, Sachin Nadella, apparently a big cricket fan, who knew, spent at least part of his Thanksgiving coding a deep research AI app for the sport that uses reasoning chains to pick all-time Indian test cricket greats. I just, I had no idea he was such a cricket fan. Yeah, well, you gotta love that spending Thanksgiving over something generating a list to just start fights. It's perfect. I'd be ready for Christmas. And thanks to feeling4208 in the subreddit for this, because Oracle's AI-driven cloud boom is meeting some resistance with its share value sinking 14 % after weak earnings, highlighting big bets the company has made on AI infrastructure combined with fears of an AI bubble.

16:03Oh, but there is no AI bubble. Haven't you heard? Well, you'll hear it here first. Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper. Yeah. Agents have come up already a couple of times on this show. AI agents are becoming the new shopping interface in a number of different ways. Andy Beach tells Tom Merritt why Fetch thinks it can organize the entire agent economy. Andy, thanks again for joining us. Hey, Tom. Good to see you. So aside from all the jokes about making Fetch happen, explain what Fetch is. What is this company doing? Yeah. So they are thinking of themselves as sort of a new shopping interface and an agent economy system.

16:45They effectively are a portal with three products now launched that allow us to go build out the agentic workflows that we're talking about. So they are effectively a catalog of all the agents that have been registered with them for various tasks. And if I'm building out a workflow, I can go find the things I want rather than trying to build it myself to put together some sort of orchestration to do a variety of different elements. If I've got this right, instead of me going into Anthropic and saying, hey, make me an agent to do this, I could go to fetch and say, I want to do this. And it would give me the agent.

17:24Yeah, exactly. Like maybe, maybe you work in, uh, travel and you need, uh, uh, a couple of different types of agents, one for pricing, one for inventory systems, one for policy control. And you don't want to go build one. You want to go look for somebody that has already built something and compare several different versions and then pull them into your workflow for, a larger piece. Yeah. So this is the search engine of agents, is it not? Yeah. In many ways, it is sort of that. And what's fascinating is, A, we just recently had the piece that we talked about around the LLM bubble. And I think this is an indicator and points to some of those trained agents and those trained pieces that Clem was talking about in that piece that will become the next wave and the pieces that are out there.

18:20What I think is interesting is this company is sort of taking the extra step of building out the catalog of them. But also what you really are going to have is an agent to agent conversation where you're probably not searching it. You have an agent that is going and looking for the right things. And that agent needs to know how to talk to the other agents and interrogate it to find the ideal aspect. So we're almost moving to this B2B marketing that is agent to agent marketing. So you don't want SEO. You want SAO, search agent optimization. Exactly. I think we're going to get a whole new host of three-letter acronyms in the SEO world for how this style coordination of work happens.

19:06That is fascinating. And I think something that in the conversation about agentic stuff is overlooked and good on Fetch for trying to be the middleman that takes advantage of it. We are not all going to want to think about agents at some point when they get reliable enough. We're just going to want the best one to do the thing for us. And then, like you said, we'll ask our agent to go do that. How do we know that Fetch is going to be able to provide us with the best agents? I mean, so they have three different products that they've effectively launched now. One is an interface for interacting with agents.

19:47The other is a brand verification portal. So I think that's the important one that it should be continually verifying and vetting the ones that are out there. But I think part of the work that we move towards also is our agent that we've delegated to go do this work is probably in some sort of continuous loop of looking for new and better agents. as part of a workflow that's there and using that feedback to make micro suggestions for how we alter the work that we're doing. Yeah. And also compatibility is important too. You need the agents that you get to work with the agents that you have. Yeah.

20:23And it's not even just about they speak the same language. It may be, again, there may be a latency issue. And if all of the agents you're working with live in AWS, but there's one that does a really good job, but it lives in another cloud, it might take a couple of extra milliseconds to get the response from it. And those couple of milliseconds might be critical for your workflow and make it impossible. So there might be a second better option that exists in the cloud that you're already perked in. Well, this is fascinating. And again, shining a light on a part of this world that is just starting to emerge.

21:01I haven't heard of anyone else doing what Fetch is doing. Have you? No, the closest I could really come up with was the notion that, you know, that OpenAI has of its agents that it has where you can train your own and publish it to a catalog. But those, again, are just their own self-contained. I haven't seen another entity, another business just start validating and verifying agents from any platform or any model. But I suspect we will start seeing more and more of these as it becomes a more popular business. And if you want to follow along with these sorts of stories, you're going to want to subscribe to Engines of Change from Andy Beach.

21:38Andy, where can they get it? Engines of Change is my sub stack. It's Engines of Change dot AI. Fantastic. Thanks, man. Thanks, Tom. Do you want to be on the show? We will be having a special show on Wednesday, December 24th at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific, where we share tech we want for the holidays or tech we received as gifts in the past. If you would like to be part of that episode, we've got two ways to participate. You can be pre-recorded or come on live. Find out more at dailytechnewsshow.com slash LCH.

22:15We end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today, Ryan has a thought. Ryan writes about Tuesday's show. listening to the main story my cynical brain can't help but kick in a limited purpose disposable device that's meant mostly for quick notes and reminders it seems pebble just announced a 99 bic pen i love it ryan i i can i can appreciate the uh the reticence around this story it is you know i mean first of all you know what is it 79 pre-order but after the pre-order it jumps to $99. So it's a hundred dollar short-term tech product. Let's consider that it lasts a couple of years.

23:00I've, I've definitely bought tech for a hundred dollars that lasts a couple of years. Um, it doesn't feel good. I want my tech to last a really long time. I would prefer for this thing to have a replaceable battery, but the thing that it does, it's very focused in, I mean, time will tell experience will tell whether it actually does that thing well, but I don't know. I saw, I saw the story and I was like, oh, I feel like it's speaking to me. It has issues, but I'm super like optimistic that it can be really useful for me. So, but I get it. I totally get it. What are you thinking about? Have you got some insight into a story?

23:37Please, as always, share it with us at feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Yeah. Huge thank you to Andy Beach. Always thank you to Ryan for the big pen and contributing to today's show with a wonderful email. And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. We'll see you tomorrow.

24:02The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.