Gemini will not allow you to make pictures with Disney characters

Disney and OpenAI reached a groundbreaking deal that granted the AI firm entry to Disney’s mental property, characters, and imagery for picture and video era. Shortly earlier than the settlement turned public on December 11, 2025, Disney despatched a cease-and-desist letter to Google, asking the corporate to “instantly stop additional copying, publicly displaying, publicly performing, distributing, and creating by-product works of Disney’s copyrighted characters.” Now, Google is taking the most important step of blocking all Disney-related era requests in Gemini and Nano Banana, as first reported by Deadline and confirmed by Android Authority.

At the moment, Gemini will deny producing pictures of any Disney-related characters and imagery. “I can’t generate the picture you requested proper now as a consequence of issues from third-party content material suppliers,” the chatbot responds. “Please edit your immediate and check out once more.”

In our testing, Gemini denied each specific and refined era requests to create pictures of Disney-owned manufacturers and properties. Gemini can nonetheless create characters and imagery associated to manufacturers not owned by Disney — we efficiently generated Nano Banana pictures of Shrek, whose IP is owned by DreamWorks and NBCUniversal. It’s value noting that within the quick days and weeks following Disney’s cease-and-desist letter, Gemini nonetheless generated pictures of Disney characters, as we confirmed in chats on December 13 and December 23.

Across the time the Disney letter was despatched, a Google spokesperson advised Ars Technica: “We have now a longstanding and mutually useful relationship with Disney, and can proceed to interact with them. Extra typically, we use public knowledge from the open net to construct our AI and have constructed further revolutionary copyright controls like Google-extended and Content material ID for YouTube, which give websites and copyright holders management over their content material.”

As of now, solely OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sora will have the ability to create officially-licensed pictures and movies utilizing Disney characters. The three-year licensing settlement offers OpenAI the reigns to generate pictures associated to over 250 characters from manufacturers like Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars.