Midjourney, the AI image tool, is asking a court to make Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. disclose their AI strategies. Disney's $1B OpenAI deal is already in the public record.
Midjourney, the AI image generation company being sued by Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. for allegedly using copyrighted material in its training, asked a federal court this week to force the studios to turn over their AI training datasets, internal business plans, and board-level presentations on generative AI. The motion escalates a copyright fight in which a June ruling had already trimmed what Midjourney can pry loose.
The filing, in Disney v. Midjourney (CACD Case No. 973999, Doc 112), asks the court to widen discovery to anything the three studios have done with generative AI. Midjourney's stated legal theory, per Variety: "If Plaintiffs are doing the very thing they seek to punish, that evidence goes to heart of Midjourney's fair use and unclean hands defenses."
That doctrine, "unclean hands," powers the motion. The argument is narrow: even granting that Midjourney trained on copyrighted material, the court can deny equitable relief to plaintiffs who have done the same thing themselves. In plain English: the studios' own AI practices, once disclosed, can shrink any equitable win they would otherwise collect.
A June 2026 ruling already curtailed how far Midjourney can dig. The studios had offered only consumer-facing materials; Midjourney's lawyers argued those leave the studio-side story untold. Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. sued Midjourney in 2025 over alleged copyright infringement in its training data.
Disney's own AI strategy gives the unclean-hands argument its clearest public anchor. In late 2025, the company disclosed a roughly $1 billion OpenAI partnership to bring hundreds of Disney characters onto Sora, OpenAI's video-generation platform. The deal collapsed earlier this year after SoraAI was shut down. Disney said it would still work with "AI platforms that respect IP and the rights of creators," language Gizmodo and Mashable read as aimed at the Midjourney suit as much as at any future partner.
Counsel David Singer told Variety that the plaintiffs want Midjourney "to stop copying their movies and TV shows and to stop…publicly performing and creating derivative works." He framed it as ordinary copyright enforcement, not an anti-AI campaign. A court order forcing disclosure of training datasets and board-level AI plans would still be the kind of internal exposure most large companies fight hard to avoid.
If the court grants the motion, the studios face an order to disclose AI training materials and strategies that large public companies routinely shield from discovery. If it denies, Midjourney heads toward trial with the SoraAI deal visible in the public record and the studios' internal AI practices still opaque.