AI Daily: Disney, Universal sue Midjourney for copyright infringement

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT: Disney (DIS) and Universal (CMCSA) have filed a lawsuit against AI image generator Midjourney, contending that the company “helped itself to countless” copyrighted works to train its software, which allows people to create images that “blatantly incorporate and copy Disney’s and Universal’s famous characters,” The New York Times’ Brooks Barnes reports. “Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” the companies said in the lawsuit, which was filed in United States District Court in Los Angeles.

AI CLOUD SERVICE: AWS (AMZN) is preparing to revamp its AI cloud service, Bedrock, making it easier for businesses to use a wider array of AI models, The Information’s Kevin McLaughlin reports. AI apps and agents run on the cloud service. AWS is adding components to the runtime so that even AI models hosted on other companies’ clouds can run on Bedrock, a source said. Still, it isn’t clear whether the revamp would let AWS customers manage OpenAI models, which run exclusively on Microsoft’s (MSFT) cloud servers, from within the AWS Bedrock application. Bedrock doesn’t currently allow that. Many customers want to run their application code on AWS while also using AI models from Microsoft, OpenAI and Google (GOOGL), said an executive at an AWS business partner.

AI COPILOT: Microsoft (MSFT) is working on a version of its 365 Copilot AI tool for the Pentagon, Business Insider’s Ashley Stewart reports. “For DoD environments, Microsoft 365 Copilot is expected to become available no earlier than summer 2025,” the company stated in a recent blog written for government customers. “Work is ongoing to ensure the offering meets the necessary security and compliance standards.”

META SUES CRUSHAI: Meta (META) said in a blog post that it is suing Joy Timeline HK Limited, the entity behind CrushAI apps, which allow people to create AI-generated nude or sexually explicit images of individuals without their consent. The company has filed a lawsuit in Hong Kong, where Joy Timeline HK Limited is based, to prevent them from advertising CrushAI apps on Meta platforms. This follows multiple attempts by Joy Timeline HK Limited to circumvent Meta’s ad review process and continue placing these ads, after they were repeatedly removed for breaking the company’s rules.

“With nudify apps being advertised across the internet – and available in App Stores themselves – removing them from one platform alone isn’t enough,” Meta said. “Now, when we remove ads, accounts or content promoting these services, we’ll share information – starting with URLs to violating apps and websites – with other tech companies through the Tech Coalition’s Lantern program, so they can investigate and take action too. Since we started sharing this information at the end of March, we’ve provided more than 3,800 unique URLs to participating tech companies. We already share signals about violating child safety activity, including sextortion, with other companies, and this is an important continuation of that work.” The company also said it is evolving its enforcement methods on these matters, including developing new technology specifically designed to identify these types of ads.

DEEPMIND RESEARCHER: Jack Rae, a principal researcher at Google (GOOGL) DeepMind, is expected to join Meta’s (META) “superintelligence” team, as well as Johan Schalkwyk, a machine learning lead from Sesame AI, Bloomberg’s Shirin Ghaffary, Kurt Wagner, and Riley Griffin report, citing multiple people familiar with the matter. The team, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is offering compensation packages worth tens of millions of dollars to recruit around 50 people, including a chief scientist, to improve Meta’s AI models and tools.

AI CLOUD PROJECT: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is gathering new investors to fund its efforts to become a significant player in AI, snagging cash from Cisco (CSCO) and AMD (AMD) for a cloud project that is crucial to its attempts to refocus spending on domestic technology, The Information’s Miles Kruppa reports.