Disney is paying OpenAI a billion dollars while threatening legal action against Google.

Trump is stripping states of their AI powers.

Meta might be closing its open-source doors.

Is it backwards week?

Yuuuuup. It sure feels like it.

If you blinked this week, you missed a total reshuffling of the AI hierarchy. The biggest players are swapping strategies and signing massive checks.

It is a lot to process.

But don't worry. You can skip the doom-scrolling.

Here is what matters.

Does Disney love AI or hate it?

Well, the answer is complicated.

The Walt Disney Company announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI this past week. This deal grants the AI giant access to copyrighted characters from Star Wars and Marvel for use in Sora.

But there is a twist.

On the very same day, Disney issued a cease and desist letter to Google. They accused the search giant of massive copyright infringement through its GenAI models.

Disney is choosing winners and losers right now.

They are opening the vault for OpenAI’s video generator to use costumes and props for clips up to a minute long. Meanwhile, they are legally threatening Google for doing similar work without a deal.

What it means: Like we’ve always said: Media companies big and small have three choices. Partner, sue, or lose money.

Disney decided to do two of them at once.

They are partnering with one giant while threatening another. Expect other legacy media giants to follow this exact playbook as the legal dominos in AI world slowly drop.

Who gets to make the rules for artificial intelligence?

President Donald Trump signed an executive order this past week aimed at blocking US states from enforcing their own AI regulations. The order calls for a single central source of approval at the federal level.

This effectively neuters state-level legislation.

White House AI adviser David Sacks stated the order gives the administration authority to push back against onerous state rules. The goal is simple.

The administration wants to prevent a patchwork of laws that could slow down American innovation against China.

California Governor Gavin Newsom immediately accused the President of siding with tech allies over consumer safety. But for now, the federal government is taking the wheel.

What it means: The regulatory landscape just got a lot simpler for big tech.

Companies like OpenAI and Google won't have to navigate fifty different rulebooks.

However, this likely removes many consumer safety guardrails that states were trying to build.

The era of free, high-power AI models might be over.

According to reports, Meta is shifting gears away from open-source for its next major release.

Unlike previous Llama models, the new "Avocado" variant is expected to be proprietary. This means external developers will not have free access to the core technology or the ability to fork the model.

This is a massive strategy shift.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spent billions to catch up to OpenAI and Google. But after the lackluster reception of Llama 4 in April, the company is changing course.

There were also concerns inside Meta about rivals using their architecture without restrictions.

They are still increasing capital spending to $72 billion for 2025. But they aren't giving the goods away for free anymore.

What it means: The open-source community just lost its biggest champion.

If Meta locks down its best models, the gap between paid corporate AI and accessible open-source tools will widen significantly.

It could slow down innovation at the grassroots level without free access.

Are you ready for another December surprise?

CEO Sam Altman took to Twitter late Thursday to tease that the company is not done for the year.

He explicitly mentioned they have a "few little Christmas presents" coming next week.

This sounds suspiciously like a repeat of last year's "12 Days of Shipmas."

But let's be honest shorties.

Google absolutely stole the show last December by releasing Gemini 2.0 and Deep Research while OpenAI was just doing marketing streams.

OpenAI seems eager to avoid a repeat of that embarrassment.

While we know they have been testing a new image model and coding tools, the specifics remain a mystery. But with Google gaining ground, Altman clearly feels the pressure.

What it means: The AI arms race does not respect the holiday calendar or your festive plans to rest.

Expect a flurry of feature drops before the year ends as OpenAI tries to reclaim the narrative.

Developers and users should prepare for major tool updates right before the holidays.

Google just quietly dropped a massive update that changes how we find information.

Google has released a reimagined version of its Gemini Deep Research agent this past week. It is powered by the newest Gemini 3 Pro model and moves beyond just generating reports.

It is now a fully embeddable AI research tool.

Google is opening this tech up to third-party apps through a new interactions API.

This means the same engine used for high-stakes financial due diligence can now be built into other software.

They also plan to integrate this agent directly into Google Search, Finance, and the Gemini app. It is designed to synthesize massive volumes of information and handle heavy context.

What it means: Research is becoming an automated commodity.

Domain-specific research agents will likely flood the market now that Google has opened the API.

Users will soon expect apps to perform deep synthesis and analysis automatically.

You don't need to open the app to use the app anymore.

Adobe and OpenAI have joined forces to make Photoshop, Acrobat, and Adobe Express available directly within ChatGPT.

This is a huge usability shift.

900 million weekly active ChatGPT users can now edit photos or design invitations without leaving the chat interface. You simply link your account in the settings and describe the edits you want in natural language.

It eliminates the need for a high-powered computer to run resource-heavy desktop applications.

Users can upload a document or image and let the AI handle the actual tool manipulation. It essentially turns the chatbot into an operating system for creative work.

What it means: The chat interface is becoming the universal operating system.

Software companies are realizing that users want to stay in the conversation flow rather than switching apps.

Expect more legacy software giants to become "skills" inside of chatbots.

Can mortal AI enemies actually work together?

Apparently, the answer is yes.

The Linux Foundation has launched the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) this past week to set open standards for autonomous agents.

This new group brings together fierce competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft. They are working side-by-side to ensure their AI agents can actually talk to one another.

The foundation centers on three main open-source projects including Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Other members include heavy hitters like Amazon, Salesforce, and IBM.

The goal is to create interchangeable protocols so a bot from one platform can execute tasks on another. It is a necessary step to prevent a fragmented, broken ecosystem.

What it means: Interoperability is the next major hurdle for AI.

For AI agents to be useful in the enterprise, they cannot live in walled gardens.

This alliance proves that a standardized infrastructure is necessary for the technology to scale.

OpenAI finally stopped focusing on the fluff and fixed the model.

OpenAI's new GPT-5.2 model delivers significant gains in writing, coding, and reasoning.

This launch follows an internal "code red" led by Sam Altman to prioritize model performance over flashy features. And the numbers look promising.

The new "Thinking" version of the model outperformed human professionals in over 70% of tasks on the GDP-val benchmark.

It also completed those tasks 11 times faster than humans.

Even more impressive is the "four needles" benchmark. GPT-5.2 achieved nearly 100% retrieval at 256k tokens.

Compare that to GPT-5.1, which dropped to 40% accuracy at that length.

It seems the company finally figured out how to make long-context memory actually work.

What it means: Reliability is finally catching up to the hype.

The ability to maintain accuracy over long conversations makes this model actually viable for complex work.

OpenAI is pivoting back to core competence rather than just chasing consumer trends.