AFP USA

Walt Disney and OpenAI announced a three-year licensing deal Thursday that will allow users to create short videos featuring beloved Disney characters through artificial intelligence.The deal marks the first time a major entertainment company has embraced generative AI at this scale, licensing its fiercely protected characters — from Mickey Mouse to Marvel superheroes and Star Wars’s Darth Vader — for AI content creation.The partnership represents a dramatic shift for an industry that has largely been battling AI companies in court.Disney and other creative industry giants had been suing AI firms like OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic, accusing them of illegally using their content to train their technology.The entertainment giant continued that legal campaign on Wednesday, separately sending a cease and desist letter to Google over the illegal use of its intellectual property to train the search engine giant’s AI models.For OpenAI, the deal comes at a sensitive time as it faces increasing questions about the sustainability of its business model, with costs skyrocketing far faster than revenue despite nearing one billion daily users worldwide.Under the agreement, fans will be able to produce and share AI-generated content featuring more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars franchises on OpenAI’s Sora video generation platform and ChatGPT.The partnership includes a $1 billion equity investment by Disney in OpenAI, along with warrants to purchase additional shares in the ChatGPT maker.Disney shares rose as much as two percent on Thursday after the announcement.”The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry,” said Disney CEO Robert Iger, adding the collaboration would “thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling.”Characters available for fan creations will include Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Elsa from Frozen, and Marvel heroes like Iron Man and Captain America, as well as Star Wars icons including Darth Vader and Yoda.The agreement excludes talent likenesses and voices from actors amid deep concern in Hollywood about the impact of AI on the creative industry.”This does not in any way represent a threat to the creators at all — in fact the opposite. I think it honors them and respects them, in part because there’s a license fee associated with it,” Iger told CNBC.- 30 seconds -Iger, in a joint interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on CNBC, insisted that the deal only includes videos no longer than 30 seconds and that the technology wouldn’t be used for longer form productions.Beyond licensing, Disney will deploy OpenAI’s technology to build new products and experiences for Disney+, the streaming platform, and will make ChatGPT available to its staff.”Disney is the global gold standard for storytelling,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. “This agreement shows how AI companies and creative leaders can work together responsibly.”Both companies emphasized their commitment to responsible AI use, with OpenAI pledging age-appropriate policies and controls to prevent illegal or harmful content generation and protect creator rights.In Disney’s complaint against Google, OpenAI’s biggest rival in the AI space, the entertainment giant accuses Google of infringing Disney’s copyrights on a massive scale by copying a large corpus of content without authorization to train and develop AI models and services.”We’ve been aggressive at protecting our IP, and we’ve gone after other companies that have…not valued it, and this is another example of us doing just that,” Iger told CNBC.

Time magazine named the “Architects of AI” as its Person of the Year on Thursday, highlighting the US tech titans whose work on cutting-edge artificial intelligence is transforming humanity.Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk are among the innovators who have “grabbed the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods,” Time wrote.One of two covers of the magazine is a homage to the famous 1932 photograph of ironworkers casually eating lunch on a steel beam above New York City.In the Time illustration, sitting astride the city are Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, AMD chief Lisa Su, Musk, Huang, Altman as well as Google’s AI boss Demis Hassabis, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li. “Racing both beside and against each other, they placed multibillion-dollar bets on one of the biggest physical infrastructure projects of all time,” the magazine said of the group.”They reoriented government policy, altered geopolitical rivalries, and brought robots into homes. AI emerged as arguably the most consequential tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons.”Alongside popular AI models like ChatGPT and Claude, Time credited investors like SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, who has plunged billions of dollars into the technology.Time’s Person of the Year selection is an acknowledgement of the year’s most influential figure. The title last year went to president-elect Donald Trump. Others have included singer Taylor Swift and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky.- ‘Gravitational center of 2025’ -According to the magazine, which is owned by Silicon Valley billionaire Marc Benioff, 2025 was the year AI shifted from promise to reality and when ChatGPT usage more than doubled to 10 percent of the world’s population.”This is the single most impactful technology of our time,” Huang, CEO of chipmaker Nvidia — the most valuable company in the world — told Time. He predicted that AI will eventually grow the global economy from $100 trillion to $500 trillion.But the magazine also pointed to AI’s darker side.Lawsuits have alleged that chatbots contributed to suicides and mental health crises, sparking debates about “chatbot psychosis,” where users may devolve into delusions and paranoia.In one case, the California parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine are suing OpenAI after he took his own life. They claim that ChatGPT provided information about suicide methods.Time noted too looming job displacement as more companies race to replace workers with AI models.Yet the magazine notably steered away from using AI to generate its cover art, opting instead for human artists.Thomas Hudson, chief analyst at US research firm Forrester, said the Person of the Year choice rightly reflected AI’s heavy influence this year.”AI has been the gravitational center of 2025 for the economy and the source of endless discussions on how it will shape the future of our societies,” he said in a statement.

US senators were set to vote Thursday on dueling health care plans that are both expected to be rejected, with millions of Americans facing soaring premiums and the issue poised to be a major flashpoint in next year’s midterm elections.President Donald Trump has remained largely disengaged from Capitol Hill negotiations, according to lawmakers in both parties, reluctant to spearhead a major health care push and declining to endorse any proposal to extend expiring subsidies.Without action, insurance payments for more than 20 million low- and middle-income Americans are projected to more than double in January, raising the political stakes as Washington edges into a campaign season defined by cost-of-living pressures.Neither the Democratic nor Republican proposal has much chance of advancing, however, leaving looming uncertainty over enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies that expire on December 31. The vote on the Democratic plan — a three-year extension of the subsidies — was secured last month as part of the deal that ended a record 43-day government shutdown. But while Republican Majority Leader John Thune agreed to hold the vote, he has not promised its success, and Republicans appear unified in opposition.Under pressure from moderates and senators up for reelection, Thune agreed to bring forward a Republican alternative for a vote alongside the Democratic bill. This plan would replace subsidies with contributions to Health Savings Accounts to help cover out-of-pocket expenses. But it too has little hope of reaching the 60-vote threshold, with only 53 Republicans making up the majority.The average payment is expected to rise by roughly 114 percent — an extra $1,000–$1,500 in annual premiums for a typical family — according to health policy research group KFF. – ‘Half-baked ideas’ -Up to seven million ACA enrollees could lose their coverage altogether, statistical modeling indicates, and most are expected to become uninsured rather than switching to other plans. Thune, however, signaled that Thursday’s defeats might open the way for talks in 2026. “When we get through this exercise this week the question is, ‘Are there enough Democrats who want to fix the problem?'” he told reporters on Wednesday, adding that he believed there was “a path forward.””Obviously we don’t have a lot of time to do this, but I think there are ways in which you could, where there’s a will.”Republicans say they are unwilling to back a clean extension but believe the broader issue of rising health costs can be addressed early next year, potentially as part of negotiations over government funding due to expire on January 30. They are hoping to use special Senate procedures to circumvent the 60-vote rule and go it alone, arguing that Democrats have little incentive to compromise in an election year — a calculation the minority party denies.In the House, the landscape is even more fractured. Multiple Republicans — including the leadership — unveiled a plethora of ideas aimed at lowering costs, though none includes extending ACA subsidies or looks to have sufficient backing. With competing petitions, no unified House strategy, and little sign of leadership buy-in, the chances of a bipartisan compromise emerging before year’s end appear slim.Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called on Republicans to abandon their “hodgepodge of half-baked ideas” in a floor speech Wednesday and back the Democratic health care effort.”What we need to do is prevent premiums from skyrocketing, and only our bill does that,” he said. “It’s the last train out of the station to avoid these sky-high premiums from going up and up and up.”

Walt Disney and OpenAI announced a three-year licensing deal Thursday that will allow users to create short videos featuring beloved Disney characters through artificial intelligence.The deal marks the first time a major entertainment company has embraced generative AI at this scale, licensing its fiercely protected characters — from Mickey Mouse to Marvel superheroes and Star Wars’s Darth Vader — for AI content creation.The partnership represents a dramatic shift for an industry that has largely been battling AI companies in court. Disney and other creative industry giants had been suing AI firms like OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic, accusing them of illegally using their content to train their technology.The deal comes at a sensitive time for OpenAI, which faces increasing questions about the sustainability of its business model, with costs skyrocketing far faster than revenue despite nearing one billion daily users worldwide.Under the agreement, fans will be able to produce and share AI-generated content featuring more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars franchises on OpenAI’s Sora video generation platform and ChatGPT.The partnership includes a $1 billion equity investment by Disney in OpenAI, along with warrants to purchase additional shares in the ChatGPT maker.Disney shares rose by about two percent on Thursday after the announcement.”The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry,” said Disney CEO Robert Iger, adding the collaboration would “thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling.”Characters available for fan creations will include Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Elsa from Frozen, and Marvel heroes like Iron Man and Captain America, as well as Star Wars icons including Darth Vader and Yoda. The agreement excludes talent likenesses and voices from actors.Beyond licensing, Disney will deploy OpenAI’s technology to build new products and experiences for Disney+, the streaming platform, and will make ChatGPT available to its employees.”Disney is the global gold standard for storytelling,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. “This agreement shows how AI companies and creative leaders can work together responsibly.”Both companies emphasized their commitment to responsible AI use, with OpenAI pledging age-appropriate policies and controls to prevent illegal or harmful content generation and protect creator rights.

The US trade deficit narrowed unexpectedly in September to the smallest since 2020, delayed government data showed Thursday, with imports rising just slightly as President Donald Trump’s new tariffs set in.The overall trade deficit fell 10.9 percent to $52.8 billion, the lowest since mid-2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic.This came as exports rose 3.0 percent to $289.3 billion, while imports edged up 0.6 percent to $342.1 billion, the Commerce Department said.The trade figures are the latest in a series of official economic reports postponed due to a record-long government shutdown between October and mid-November.The stoppage had left officials and companies to navigate policy and business decisions without key indicators on the health of the world’s biggest economy. But reports are now trickling out.Thursday’s figures also showed how Trump’s new tariffs this year continue to weigh on trade, after sweeping increases targeting dozens of trading partners hit the country’s imports in August as well.On August 7, Trump’s steeper global tariffs took effect on goods from economies ranging from the European Union to Japan.Trade flows have been heavily swayed this year by the president’s fast-changing duties, as importers rushed to stock up on inventory ahead of various planned hikes in tariffs.The Budget Lab at Yale University estimated as of November that consumers face an overall average effective rate that is the highest since the 1930s.In particular, Washington and Beijing engaged in a tit-for-tat tariff escalation earlier this year that took duties to prohibitive triple-digit levels, snarling trade flows.Both sides have since agreed to a de-escalation, although the truce has been uneasy.Trump has moved to end the “de minimis” exemption allowing lower value shipments to enter the country duty-free as well.Surveys of economists conducted by Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal had instead expected September’s trade deficit to widen to $62.0 billion.But Oliver Allen, senior US economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, warned in a note that “the marked drop in the overall trade deficit in September tells us little, since it was almost entirely due to a big jump in exports of gold bullion.”He expects this export strength to unwind in the fourth quarter of the year.He noted that “tariffs have so far failed to spark a big wave of import substitution.”In September, US goods imports increased as a whole, but those of capital goods like computers and electric apparatus dropped, according to Commerce Department data.US goods exports climbed as well, with those of consumer goods like pharmaceutical preparations and industrial supplies rising.

Japan said Thursday it held a joint air exercise with the United States in a show of force, days after Chinese-Russian patrols in the region and following weeks of diplomatic feuding between Tokyo and Beijing.The Japanese joint chiefs of staff said Wednesday’s exercise with the US Air Force was conducted in “an increasingly severe security environment surrounding our country”.Tokyo said Wednesday that two Russian Tu-95 nuclear-capable bombers flew a day earlier from the Sea of Japan to rendezvous with two Chinese H-6 bombers in the East China Sea, then conducted a joint flight around the country.Japan said that it scrambled fighter jets in response.Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi angered Beijing last month by suggesting that Japan would intervene with military force in any Chinese attack on Taiwan.Thursday’s announcement by Japan’s chiefs of staff said: “We confirmed the strong resolve of Japan and the United States not to allow any unilateral change of the status quo by force, as well as the readiness of the Self-Defense Forces and the US military.”In a separate statement it said that the “tactical exercises” over the Japan Sea involved two US B52 bombers, three Japanese F-35 fighter jets and three Japanese F-15s.The joint exercise came as the United States criticized Beijing for the first time on Wednesday after Chinese military aircraft locked radar onto Japanese jets on Saturday.The J-15 jets from China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier twice locked radar on Japanese aircraft in international waters near Okinawa, according to Japan, which scrambled jets in response.”China’s actions are not conducive to regional peace and stability,” a US State Department spokesperson told AFP on Wednesday.”The U.S.-Japan Alliance is stronger and more united than ever. Our commitment to our ally Japan is unwavering, and we are in close contact on this and other issues.”Fighter jets use their radar for fire control to identify targets as well as for search and rescue operations. Tokyo also summoned Beijing’s ambassador following the radar incident, over which the two countries offer differing accounts of events.Japan said it scrambled its F-15 jets because it was worried about possible “airspace violations”.Guo Jiakun, spokesman for the ministry of foreign affairs, accused Japan Wednesday of sending the jets “to intrude into the Chinese training area without authorisation, conduct close-range reconnaissance and harassment, create tense situations, and continue to maliciously hype up the situation”.Takaichi’s comments about intervening in any Taiwan emergency enraged Beijing as China claims the self-ruled island as its own and has not ruled out seizing it by force.Tokyo was forced to deny a Wall Street Journal report that said US President Donald Trump had advised Takaichi not to provoke China over Taiwan’s sovereignty.But Tokyo is apparently frustrated at the lack of public support from top officials in Washington and has urged the US to be more vocal, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.- ‘Regrettable’ -NATO chief Mark Rutte said on Wednesday that the radar incident and the joint Chinese-Russian patrols were “regrettable”, Japan’s Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi said on X.The statement followed a 15-minute video conference between Rutte and Koizumi, the defence ministry said in a statement.Rutte “affirmed that security in the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic regions is completely inseparable”, Koizumi said.South Korea said Tuesday that Russian and Chinese warplanes also entered its air defence zone, with Seoul also deploying fighter jets that same day.Beijing confirmed later on Tuesday that it had organised drills with Russia’s military according to “annual cooperation plans”.Moscow also described it as a routine exercise, saying it lasted eight hours and that some foreign fighter jets followed the Russian and Chinese aircraft.

The administration of US President Donald Trump plans to order visa-exempt foreign tourists to disclose their social media histories from the last five years before entering the country, according to an official notice.The proposal laid out in a notice published Tuesday in the Federal Register would apply to visitors from 42 countries, including Britain, France, Australia and Japan, who do not need a visa to enter the United States.Currently, those travellers only need apply for a waiver known as the Electonic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA), which still requires them to provide certain personal details.Under the proposed new rules, the collection of social media data would become a “mandatory” part of ESTA applications.Applicants would need to provide their social media histories from the last five years, according to the notice.They would also have to submit other “high-value data fields” including phone numbers from the last five years, email addresses from the past decade, personal details of family members and biometric information.The public has 60 days to comment on the proposal.The Trump administration has tightened curbs on entering the United States, part of a sweeping crackdown on migration.Along with Mexico and Canada, the country will host the 2026 World Cup, which is certain to attract large numbers of soccer fans from across the world. 

Back in 2018, President Donald Trump disputed having used the epithet “shithole” to describe some countries whose citizens emigrated to the United States.Nowadays, he embraces it and pushes his anti-immigrant and xenophobic tirades even further.Case in point: during a rally in the northeastern state of Pennsylvania on Wednesday that was supposed to focus on his economic policy, the 79-year-old Republican openly ranted and reused the phrase that had sparked an outcry during his first term.”We had a meeting and I said, ‘Why is it we only take people from shithole countries,’ right? ‘Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden?'” Trump told his cheering audience. “But we always take people from Somalia,” he continued. “Places that are a disaster. Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”Recently, he called Somali immigrants “trash.”These comments are “more proof of his racist, anti-immigrant agenda,” Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey responded on X.- The Trump megaphone -Florida Republican lawmaker Randy Fine, on the other hand, defended Trump.”Not all cultures are equal and not all countries are equal,” he said on CNN, adding “the president speaks in language that Americans understand, he is blunt.”University of Albany history professor Carl Bon Tempo told AFP this type of anti-immigrant rhetoric has long thrived on the far-right.”The difference is now it’s coming directly out of the White House,” he said, adding “there’s no bigger megaphone” in American politics.On the campaign trail in 2023, Trump told a rally in New Hampshire that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” — a remark that drew comparisons to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. Now back in power, Trump’s administration has launched a sweeping and brutal deportation campaign and suspended immigration applications from nationals of 19 of the poorest countries on the planet.Simultaneously, the president ordered white South African farmers to be admitted to the US, claiming their persecution.- No filter left -“Any filter he might have had is gone,” Terri Givens, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada and immigration policy expert, told AFP. For Trump, it doesn’t matter whether an immigrant obeys the law, or owns a business, or has been here for decades, according to Syracuse University political science professor Mark Brockway.”They are caught in the middle of Trump’s fight against an invented evil enemy,” Brockway told AFP.By describing some immigrants as “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” — as Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem did earlier this month — the White House is designating a target other than itself for American economic ire at a time when the cost of living has gone up and fears are growing over job security and loss of federal benefits.But, Bon Tempo noted, “when immigration spikes as an issue, it spikes because of economics sometimes, but it also spikes because of these larger sort of foundational questions about what it means to be an American.”On November 28, after an Afghan national attacked two National Guard soldiers in Washington, Trump took to his Truth Social network to call for “REVERSE MIGRATION.”This notion, developed by European far-right theorists such as French writer Renaud Camus, refers to the mass expulsion of foreigners deemed incapable of assimilation.Digging into the “Make America Great Again” belief system, many experts have noted echoes of the “nativist” current of politics from the 1920s in the US, which held that white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture was the true American identity.That stance led to immigration policies favoring Northern and Western Europe.As White House senior advisor Stephen Miller recently wrote on X: “This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies…At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”

In pursuit of the AI dream, the tech industry this year has plunked down about $400 billion on specialized chips and data centers, but questions are mounting about the wisdom of such unprecedented levels of investment.At the heart of the doubts: overly optimistic estimates about how long these specialized chips will last before becoming obsolete. With persistent worries of an AI bubble and so much of the US economy now riding on the boom in artificial intelligence, analysts warn that the wake-up call could be brutal and costly.”Fraud” is how renowned investor Michael Burry, made famous by the movie “The Big Short,” described the situation on X in early November.Before the AI wave unleashed by ChatGPT, cloud computing giants typically assumed that their chips and servers would last about six years.But Mihir Kshirsagar of Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy says the “combination of wear and tear along with technological obsolescence makes the six-year assumption hard to sustain.”One problem: chip makers — with Nvidia the unquestioned leader — are releasing new, more powerful processors much faster than before.Less than a year after launching its flagship Blackwell chip, Nvidia announced that Rubin would arrive in 2026 with performance 7.5 times greater.At this pace, chips lose 85 to 90 percent of their market value within three to four years, warned Gil Luria of financial advisory firm D.A. Davidson.Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made the point himself in March, explaining that when Blackwell was released, nobody wanted the previous generation of chip anymore.”There are circumstances where Hopper is fine,” he added, referring to the older chip. “Not many.”AI processors are also failing more often than in the past, Luria noted.”They run so hot that sometimes the equipment just burns out,” he said.A recent Meta study on its Llama AI model found an annual failure rate of 9 percent.- Profit risk -For Kshirsagar and Burry alike, the realistic lifespan of these AI chips is just two or three years.Nvidia pushed back in an unusual November statement, defending the industry’s four-to-six-year estimate as based on real-world evidence and usage trends.But Kshirsagar believes these optimistic assumptions mean the AI boom rests on “artificially low” costs — and consequences are inevitable.If companies were forced to shorten their depreciation timelines, “it would immediately impact the bottom line” and slash profits, warned Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research.”This is where companies get in trouble with creative bookkeeping.”The fallout could ripple through an economy increasingly dependent on AI, analysts warn.Luria isn’t worried about giants like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, which have diverse revenue streams. His concern focuses on AI specialists like Oracle and CoreWeave.Both companies are already heavily indebted while racing to buy more chips to compete for cloud customers.Building data centers requires raising significant capital, Luria points out.”If they look like they’re a lot less profitable” because equipment must be replaced more frequently, “it will become more expensive for them to raise the capital.”The situation is especially precarious because some loans use the chips themselves as collateral.Some companies hope to soften the blow by reselling older chips or using them for less demanding tasks than cutting-edge AI.A chip from 2023, “if economically viable, can be used for second-tier problems and as a backup,” Peddie said.

Shares in business computing giant Oracle fell more than 10 percent on Wednesday on word its revenue missed heady expectations, dampening artificial intelligence euphoria in the market.The slide in after-market trades came despite Texas-based Oracle reporting that net income in the recently-ended quarter nearly doubled to $6.1 billion in revenue, up 14 percent from the same period a year earlier to $16.05 billion.Oracle’s cloud and business computing unit accounted for $8 billion of that revenue, an increase of 34 percent from the same quarter in 2024, according to the earnings report.”AI training and selling AI models are very big businesses,” Oracle chief executive Mike Sicilia said in the release.”We think there is an even larger opportunity — embedding AI in a variety of different products.”But investors are wary of the massive investments tech companies are making in artificial intelligence models and infrastructure, wondering how and when they will pay off.Oracle has taken on billions of dollars in debt to pay for AI infrastruture and is reported to be considering borrowing even more.The company has also announced it is putting significant resources into partnerships with AI chip makers and model builders, such as OpenAI and Meta.”We are now committed to a policy of chip neutrality where we work closely with all our CPU and GPU suppliers,” Oracle founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison said in the earnings release.”There are going to be a lot of changes in AI technology over the next few years, and we must remain agile in response to those changes.”Oracle shares were down some 10.7 percent to $199.50 in after-market trades that followed release of the earnings figures.