Disney’s billion-dollar AI bet on OpenAI

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Disney just did what every media company has been reluctant to do — hand over the keys to its kingdom to AI.

With a brand new licensing deal and $1B investment into OpenAI, the Mouse is making its first (legal) appearance in Sora — and hitting the AI leader’s rivals with cease-and-desists in the method to completely shift the IP landscape.

Reminder: Our next live workshop is today at 4 PM EST. Attend and learn the way to leverage Google’s Workspace Studio to create practical AI automations for tasks like email inbox triage, template constructing, and more. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

• OpenAI, Disney lock in $1B licensing deal

• OpenAI drops GPT-5.2, hits back at Google

• Create and deploy voice agents for your enterprise

• Google opens upgraded Deep Research agent to devs

• 4 latest AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI & DISNEY

🤝 OpenAI, Disney lock in $1B licensing deal

The Rundown: Disney just announced a three-year licensing take care of OpenAI, giving Sora users access to over 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars — alongside a $1B equity investment into the AI leader.

The small print:

• Fans will give you the chance to make use of Disney-owned IP like Mickey Mouse, Darth Vader, and the Avengers in video generations, with select creations streaming on Disney+.

• Disney can also be deploying OpenAI’s APIs across products and rolling out ChatGPT internally as a part of a broader enterprise push.

• The deal specifically excludes talent likenesses and voices, sidestepping the more complex IP battles still playing out across Hollywood.

• Disney also sent a cease-and-desist to Google on the identical day, accusing the OAI rival of generating unauthorized Disney content at “massive scale”.

Why it matters: CEO Bob Iger made waves last month when he said AI was coming to Disney+, but that is a much bigger move than anyone imagined. For OAI, the deal gives them a singular leg up on utilizing popular IPs without legal trouble — and results in a good more aggressive enforcement against rival generators as they protect that advantage.

TOGETHER WITH ATLASSIAN ROVO

👋 Meet Rovo, AI that knows your enterprise

The Rundown: Discover Atlassian Rovo – AI that knows your enterprise. Rovo connects teams, knowledge, and tools so you possibly can move faster and work smarter – together.

Why Rovo?

• Rovo connects to all of your favorite SaaS apps

• Rovo brings organizational knowledge and context into every workflow

• It’s already built into Jira, Confluence, and more.

• And it’s built on Atlassian’s enterprise-grade security & privacy.

Try Rovo today.

OPENAI

🧄 OpenAI drops GPT-5.2, hits back at Google

The Rundown: OpenAI released its GPT-5.2 model family, calling it the corporate’s “most capable series yet for skilled knowledge work”, arriving just weeks after an internal memo warned the corporate was losing ground to Google’s Gemini lineup.

The small print:

• The discharge is available in three tiers: Fast for quick queries, Pondering for complex reasoning tasks, and Pro for optimum accuracy on hard problems.

• 5.2 is an upgrade across benchmarks from 5.1, showing notable gains in hallucination rate, vision, coding, long-context reasoning, and power use.

• On GDPval, GPT-5.2 Pondering beat or matched industry professionals 71% of the time across real-world tasks like spreadsheets and presentations.

• 5.2 was reportedly released despite internal requests to delay for more polish, with OAI pushing ahead as Gemini 3 topped most public leaderboards.

Why it matters: OpenAI’s codenamed ‘Garlic’ model is here, and it packs a formidable counter-punch to Gemini 3 despite feeling like a rushed production. This month felt like one among the primary times OAI has been on its heels — but along with 5.2, it likely has some buzzy Christmas drops up its sleeve in the approaching weeks.

AI TRAINING

🗣️ Create and deploy voice agents for your enterprise

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn the way to use Cartesia to construct and deploy AI voice agents that may handle calls, take orders, or answer customer questions using natural, human-like speech.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Cartesia, click “Start for Free”, explore the dashboard, and test voices in “Text to Speech” using Sonic 3.0 for best latency and clarity

2. Scroll to “Voice Agents”, click “Text to Agent”, describe your agent (e.g., “Pizza order assistant that greets customers, takes orders, confirms details, calculates totals”)

3. Select voice preference, click “Generate”, then test using the dialer at +1 (515) 800-8360 – confirm response speed, order handling, and voice clarity

4. Click “Promote to Production” to get a working number, publish it on the positioning, and monitor performance in “Metrics” (calls handled, duration, credit usage)

Pro tip: Refine prompts as needed based on customer interactions.

PRESENTED BY MATILLION

🔧 95% of AI projects fail — here’s the fix

The Rundown: Fact – most AI projects stall before delivering value. Leading CDOs are turning to Maia, the agentic data team, to chop manual work by 90%, launch initiatives 10x faster, and eventually clear backlog bottlenecks.

Download this ebook to learn the way to:

• Cut delivery times

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• Take AI projects from PoC to production

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GOOGLE

🧠 Google opens upgraded Deep Research agent to devs

The Rundown: Google just released a significantly upgraded version of its Deep Research agent, now available to developers through a brand new Interactions API — with consumer rollouts coming soon to Search, NotebookLM, and the Gemini app.

The small print:

• The agent runs on the brand new Gemini 3 Pro, iteratively planning searches, reading results, identifying gaps, and querying again until reaching a solution.

• A brand new Interactions API unifies access to Gemini models and agents, with native support for MCP connections to external tools and data sources.

• Google also open-sourced DeepSearchQA, a 900-task benchmark designed to check multi-step web research more rigorously than existing evaluations.

• Google claims SOTA scores on Humanity’s Last Exam (46.4%) and the DeepSearchQA benchmark (66.1%), outpacing the Gemini 3 Pro base model.

Why it matters: There’s no shortage of competition within the Deep Research category, but Google’s updated agent builds nicely on top of the already powerful Gemini 3 releases. It also provides devs with the chance to leverage the tool in their very own apps for the primary time, bringing an upgrade to the research layer of third-party builds.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 💻 Augment Code Review – Purpose-built code review that catches critical issues without the noise*

• 📚 Gemini Deep Research Agent – SOTA agent for long synthesis tasks

• 🤖 GPT-5.2 – OpenAI’s latest most advanced frontier model family

• 🏷️ Shopify SimGym – Simulate buyer behavior with AI shoppers

*Sponsored Listing

📰 The whole lot else in AI today

TIME Magazine named “the architects of AI” as its 2025 Person of the 12 months, spotlighting leaders Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk.

Cursor unveiled a brand new visual editor that lets developers drag, drop, and rearrange interface elements while AI agents robotically update the underlying code.

Shopify dropped latest Winter ’26 AI features, including SimGym for simulating shopper behavior and Agentic Storefronts that surface products in AI platforms.

Runway introduced GWM-1, its first “General World Model” that may simulate interactive, explorable environments in real time.

Google Labs launched Disco, an experimental browser that uses Gemini 3 to generate custom web applications based in your open tabs and browsing tasks.

ElevenLabs announced a brand new partnership with Meta, bringing its audio and voice tech to creators on Instagram, Horizon, and more.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Jyothi V. in India:

“I used AI as an unexpected consumer-rights strategist. When a store refused returns on a 13-item order, I simply asked the way to contact them. The AI analyzed the situation, identified that the policy was buried, and suggested a negotiation strategy referencing consumer rights. It drafted a firm escalation message, and the shop ended up accepting my returns. It felt like having a built-in advocate who sees angles I miss.”

How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Open-source AI crushes elite math exam

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Neuralink cofounder’s wild next act

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Skild eyes $14B for robot brains

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create and deploy voice agents for your enterprise

• RSVP to next workshop @ 4PM EST today: AI Automations Made Easy

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown