By Hamza Faisal
The Walt Disney Company has struck a multi-year deal with Adobe to build private generative AI models trained only on its own characters, worlds and visual styles, the two companies announced on Monday at Adobe MAX in Miami Beach. Under the alliance, Adobe becomes Disney's “Official AI Innovation Partner,” and Disney gets early access to Adobe's emerging creative tools, including Firefly, Photoshop and Premiere.
The models will be built through Adobe Firefly Foundry, the company's enterprise service for creating custom AI models trained on a single client's own material. Disney and Adobe said the models will remain private and proprietary to Disney, producing what they describe as production-ready output without sending the studio's intellectual property outside the company. Neither company disclosed financial terms for the deal.
Private by design
The closed approach is the point. Rather than training on the open internet, Disney's models will learn only from material the company already owns, a setup meant to keep output on brand and commercially safe. Adobe says Firefly Foundry is designed to protect creators' rights while producing work studios can actually use, a pitch aimed squarely at a media industry still arguing over how generative AI should be trained and credited.
Disney's film and theme park teams have already been testing the approach. Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development has been using Firefly Foundry to speed up theme park planning, and the new deal extends that work across the company's creative divisions.
Where the models will work first
The partnership will start by speeding up project development at Disney's Experiences division, which runs its theme parks, resorts and cruise lines, and by supporting concept exploration at StudioLAB, the innovation hub inside Walt Disney Studios. Adobe will also work with ESPN Edge, the sports network's innovation group, to use AI tools to surface more of ESPN's archive and tailor experiences for fans.
Kyle Laughlin, Disney's senior vice president of research and development technology and engineering, told Reuters the tools are already changing how long creative work takes. “We talk about the time frames in our projects in years, it's years' worth of development,” Laughlin said. “What Adobe Foundry has allowed us to do is compress the creative process that would have taken months to now being able to do that in hours and days.”
A second act after the OpenAI deal fell apart
The Adobe alliance arrives about eight months after Disney's last big AI partnership collapsed. In December 2025, Disney agreed to license more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars to OpenAI's Sora video app and planned a $1 billion investment in OpenAI. That deal ended in March 2026, when OpenAI said it was shutting Sora down, and no money changed hands.
Disney, meanwhile, is still suing the AI image generator Midjourney over copyright alongside Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery, with motions in that case due on November 23. Several questions about the Adobe deal stayed open at the announcement: neither company said whether Disney+ viewers will ever see AI-generated content, how artists will be credited, or what the alliance costs.
Disney reports its fiscal fourth-quarter results before the market opens on November 17, when investors are likely to ask how much the company plans to spend turning the partnership into finished work.
