AI Weekly Briefing: Mouse Ears and Model Wars

In this week’s 10 minute AI news roundup, I break down a headline grabbing Disney move that could redefine what “legal generative AI” looks like at scale. Disney is reportedly investing $1 billion in OpenAI, negotiating warrants for optionality, licensing a vault of iconic characters for Sora, and rolling out ChatGPT across the company with strict guardrails. But the backlash is already here, with the Writers Guild of America warning this is a turning point in the fight over creative labour and value. Then we jump into the model wars. OpenAI ships GPT 5.2 with a massive 400k context window and tiered variants for speed, deep analysis, and maximum accuracy, while Google counters with Gemini Deep Research and an Interactions API designed to embed autonomous research workflows into products. We also cover a major UK partnership with Google DeepMind aimed at accelerating science through automation, plus why Microsoft’s new Copilot pricing for small businesses, Nvidia’s move to buy the company behind Slurm, and a fresh wave of copyright lawsuits all point to one thing: the legal and infrastructure layers of AI are now product critical.