Universal Warns AI Companies: We’ll Sue If They Use Our Movies
Universal Pictures is taking a bold step to stop artificial intelligence companies from using its movies without permission. According to a source who spoke with The Hollywood Reporter, the studio has started adding a special warning at the end of its films telling AI developers to keep their hands off.
The message started appearing in June with How to Train Your Dragon and has since been spotted in Jurassic World Rebirth and Bad Guys 2. It says the movies “may not be used to train AI” and reminds viewers that “unauthorized duplication, distribution or exhibition may result in civil liability and criminal prosecution.”
Universal hopes that adding this line to films shown worldwide will make it harder for AI companies to use them for data mining and training. In some countries, the warning even cites a 2019 European Union law that lets creators block their work from being used in scientific research.
Studios like Universal are worried that AI could become a huge threat. They fear a future where audiences skip traditional movies in favor of AI-made content that borrows from existing films. Some AI companies already have big plans. For example, in July, Edward Saatchi’s Fable Studios announced Amazon had invested in its AI platform Showrunner. It lets people create episodes of a show with just a few words and aims to release the first AI-generated movie in theaters by 2026.
Saatchi says this could change how people watch and create entertainment. “Hollywood streaming services are about to become two-way entertainment,” he said. “Our relationship to entertainment will be totally different in the next 5 years.”
AI tools are already raising concerns. In 2024, some image generators like Midjourney started producing images that looked almost exactly like movie scenes. This included shots from Avengers: Infinity War, Top Gun: Maverick, Shrek, Ratatouille, and The Lego Movie. That was enough for Disney and Universal to join forces and sue Midjourney.
The legal battle will focus on whether AI companies can claim “fair use,” a law that lets creators build on existing work without permission. Some authors have already lost similar cases against Amazon-backed Anthropic and Meta. But there’s a twist: if the AI companies downloaded the movies illegally, they could face huge payouts to the studios.
Universal’s warning mentions “unauthorized duplication” because AI training involves making copies of the material. With fines of up to $150,000 per work for willful copyright infringement, the stakes are very high.
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