Over 200 classic Disney IPs are in stock in Sora! OpenAI's breakthrough “use warrants in exchange for licenses” relies on top IPs to fight Google

The Zhitong Finance App learned that some media quoted information revealed by people familiar with the matter as reporting that ChatGPT developer OpenAI was authorized to play Disney characters, but did not pay a cash license fee, but instead used an extremely rare method similar to a gambling agreement in a breakthrough. According to people familiar with the matter, the copyright licensing deal between OpenAI and Disney management for Sora, the official character of the popular Wensheng video app around the world, uses the form of warrants/share subscription rights rather than cash license fees; OpenAI will give Disney the option to further purchase shares in this rapidly growing AI startup in addition to its already announced shares of up to 1 billion US dollars in OpenAI.

These terms, which have not been officially disclosed by the two parties, aim to establish: if Sora developed by OpenAI succeeds and brings strong revenue to OpenAI, the financial incentives are consistent; Disney is equivalent to abandoning huge instant IP licensing cash revenue in exchange for potentially larger upward equity assets in the future.

According to the latest disclosure from people familiar with the matter, the official character license granted by Disney this time is not a cash license fee, but is reflected in the form of OpenAI's “stock warrants” (stock warrants), and allows Disney to obtain important options to further purchase OpenAI shares in addition to the announced investments. Disney can be described as using strong IP list value in exchange for the upward risk-return curve of OpenAI's shares. The specific potential benefits depend on the speed of Sora's commercialization and the path of OpenAI's future liquidity events (such as further equity trades/listings, etc.).

You need to know that for super investment giants such as SoftBank and Thrive Holdings, it can be described as scrambling to buy OpenAI shares, so it is a very cost-effective risk-return path for Disney to gamble through official Disney character authorization.

In the context of “OpenAI equity is highly scarce and institutions are competing for allocation,” Disney uses IP licensing in exchange for (or additional acquisition) of OpenAI shares or “warrants” in the strict sense of the word. Essentially, it uses content assets to make an “option-style bet tied to Sora's success or failure,” and its risk-return structure may indeed be more cost-effective for Disney.

Both OpenAI and Disney declined to comment.

According to information, the two sides jointly announced last week that Disney will allow the Sora Wensheng video app to use its officially licensed Disney library of more than 200 animated and biological characters, including Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, Ariel, and Simba; at the same time, Disney agreed to invest 1 billion US dollars in shares using OpenAI's current valuation of about 500 billion US dollars.

The deal is known as the largest equity investment ever made by a major film studio in a big AI model and AI application startup. For OpenAI, the partnership helped it gain a foothold in Hollywood and greatly enhance Sora's competitiveness in competition with Runway and Google Nano Banana to provide similar AI video generation services.

According to media reports, OpenAI has had in-depth communication with major studios and film studios including Disney, Comcast's Universal Pictures (Universal Pictures), and Warner Bros. Discovery in the past few months about the creative and commercial potential of the Sora app.

As part of the latest deal, Disney officially agreed to use OpenAI's software technology to create new products and experiences, making it immediately one of OpenAI's best-known and largest customers by market capitalization.

The big collaboration with Disney comes at a time when Google and OpenAI staged a “pinnacle AI duel”

As ChatGPT developer OpenAI launched “ridiculously strong” GPT-5.2 in deep reasoning and code generation to compete with the Gemini 3 launched by Google in late November, and following the recent strong duel between Sora2 and Google's Nano Banana Wensheng video app to win more new users, this “pinnacle AI duel” between Google and OpenAI has reached the climax of the duel story between the two sides.

This major collaboration with Disney basically occurred when competition between OpenAI and Google heated up significantly, and the battlefield spilled from “model capability” to an important stage of “product ecology and content/distribution”: on the one hand, OpenAI continued to promote multi-modal products such as ChatGPT and Sora; on the other hand, Google accelerated the launch of stronger intelligence and AI research capabilities around the Gemini system and strengthened its multi-modal and infrastructure advantages.

Disney officially allows Sora to use more than 200 characters (and supporting equity investment and gambling) to directly enhance Sora's appeal and commercial imagination in the entertainment and short video scene. Therefore, this is undoubtedly a reinforcement of Sora's “AI Wensheng video product moat”, using top IP and Hollywood endorsements to counter Google. Allowing Sora to “lawfully call” the character library through authorization is tantamount to establishing compliance channels in high-risk areas (copyright, image rights, trade unions and platform rules) of AI content generation. Furthermore, this license innovatively “uses warrants as the core of consideration, rather than cash license fees,” which essentially allows Disney to replace “current licensing revenue” with an upward exposure to the success of OpenAI/Sora; for OpenAI, it reduces pressure on cash expenses in exchange for a super content party to become a customer and ally.

Google Gemini 3 has undoubtedly recently set off a new wave of AI applications around the world. Once released, Gemini3 series products brought huge AI token processing capacity, forcing Google to drastically reduce the amount of free access to Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro, and also imposed temporary restrictions on Pro subscribers. Combined with South Korea's recent trade export data, demand for HBM storage systems and enterprise-grade SSDs continues to be strong, further verifying that “the AI boom is still in the early stages of construction where computing power infrastructure is in short supply.”

ChatGPT developer OpenAI is determined not to lose, and this wave of AI applications is expected to rapidly spread strongly to various industries as competition between Google and OpenAI is in full swing, which will inevitably lead to a new surge in global demand for AI computing power.

To urgently combat Google's Gemini 3, OpenAI has just launched GPT-5.2 in the context of a “red alert” within the company. GPT-5.2 is OpenAI's most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) model so far. It has been fully optimized for professional work scenarios and has set the strongest record in the industry for multiple benchmark tests. Among them, GPT-5.2 Thinking broke the highest score in the SWE coding ability test in history, and is also the first OpenAI model whose performance has reached or surpassed the level of human experts. Furthermore, GPT-5.2 is superior to previous generation products in terms of creating spreadsheets, creating presentations, image recognition, code writing, and understanding long texts, and aims to “create more economic value for people.”

In scientific research areas focused on by some AI researchers, GPT-5.2 Pro achieved an accuracy rate of 93.2% in the GPQA Diamond test, followed by GPT-5.2 Thinking at 92.4%. On FrontierMath, an expert math test, GPT-5.2 Thinking solved 40.3% of problems, setting an unprecedented record. OpenAI called GPT-5.2 Pro and GPT-5.2 Thinking “the world's best assistant models for scientists.”