On Thursday, Disney and OpenAI announced a deal that might have seemed unthinkable not so long ago. Starting next year, OpenAI will be able to use Disney characters like Mickey Mouse, Ariel, and Yoda in its Sora video-generation model. Disney will take a $1 billion stake in OpenAI, and its employees will get access to the firm’s APIs and ChatGPT. None of this makes much sense—unless Disney was fighting a battle it couldn’t win.

Disney has always been a notoriously aggressive litigant around its intellectual property. Alongside fellow IP powerhouse Universal, it sued Midjourney in June over outputs that allegedly infringed on classic film and TV characters. The night before the OpenAI deal was announced, Disney reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google alleging copyright infractions on a “massive scale.”

On the surface, there appears to be some dissonance with Disney embracing OpenAI while poking its rivals. But it’s more than likely that Hollywood is embarking down a similar path as media publishers when it comes to AI, signing licensing agreements where it can and using litigation when it can’t. (WIRED is owned by Condé Nast, which inked a deal with OpenAI in August 2024.)

“I think that AI companies and copyright holders are beginning to understand and become reconciled to the fact that neither side is going to score an absolute victory,” says Matthew Sag, a professor of law and artificial intelligence at Emory University. While many of these cases are still working their way through the courts, so far it seems like model inputs—the training data that these models learn from—are covered by fair use. But this deal is about outputs—what the model returns based on your prompt—where IP owners like Disney have a much stronger case

Coming to an output agreement resolves a host of messy, potentially unsolvable issues. Even if a company tells an AI model not to produce, say, Elsa at a Wendy’s drive-through, the model might know enough about Elsa to do so anyway—or a user might be able to prompt their way into making Elsa without asking for the character by name. It’s a tension that legal scholars call the “Snoopy problem,” but in this case you might as well call it the Disney problem.

“Faced with this increasingly clear reality, it makes sense for consumer-facing AI companies and entertainment giants like Disney to think about licensing arrangements,” says Sag.

AT&T is taking a second crack at the smart home. After sunsetting its Digital Life service in 2022—powered by the now-defunct 3G network—the company is launching a new smart-home security platform called Connected Life, this time in partnership with smart-home players Google and Abode.

Previously available as a pilot program in select markets, AT&T Connected Life is rolling out nationwide starting today. The vision behind it is to simplify smart-home setup. Instead of buying various smart-home devices and using multiple apps to connect them, you can buy one of two kits directly from AT&T’s Connected Life website—the Starter Kit ($11 per month for 36 months) or the Advanced Kit ($19 per month for 36 months). You can also pay upfront for the kits at $399 and $699, respectively.

Each includes Google Nest smart-home products and security sensors, with the Advanced Kit offering more sensors, a security keypad, and a Nest Cam security camera. (Google confirmed the Nest products on offer are not the latest devices the company launched recently.) You’ll use the Connected Life app and the Google Home app to set everything up, though you can also get help from a technician if you don’t want to DIY.

Google says the platform leverages Google Home’s application programming interface (API) to integrate Google’s smart home devices into the Connected Life app, and after setup, users can solely rely on the Connected Life app to view livestreams and manage devices.

There are two subscription tiers: Essential ($11 per month) or Professional ($22 per month). They offer access to features like 30-day event video history and intelligent alerts, though the Professional plan includes a US-based monitoring service from Abode that can dispatch police and medical services during emergencies. The system is designed so that you can pause professional monitoring when you don’t need it, rather than being locked into a contract.

AT&T is touting the Cellular Backup feature in Connected Life: If your home internet goes offline, this feature will keep your smart-home devices running by routing data through your smartphone (via the hot spot), and there’s a battery backup for the hub in case power goes out. This was a cornerstone feature of AT&T’s old Digital Life service, but cellular backup is now a staple in many smart-home security systems, like those from SimpliSafe or ADT.

You need to be an AT&T customer to use the Connected Life platform, though it doesn’t matter if you have a wireless mobile plan or home internet. This means the potential customer base for these new smart-home services is massive; AT&T has 119 million wireless mobile customers and is the largest provider of fiber home internet in the US, with more than 10 million customers.

A Virginia startup calling itself Operation Bluebird announced this week that it has filed a formal petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office, asking the federal agency to cancel X Corporation’s trademarks of the words “Twitter” and “tweet” since X has allegedly abandoned them.

“The TWITTER and TWEET brands have been eradicated from X Corp.’s products, services, and marketing, effectively abandoning the storied brand, with no intention to resume use of the mark,” the petition states. “The TWITTER bird was grounded.”

If successful, two leaders of the group tell Ars, Operation Bluebird would launch a social network under the name Twitter.new, possibly as early as late next year. (Twitter.new has created a working prototype and is already inviting users to reserve handles.)

Neither X Corporation nor its owner Elon Musk immediately responded to Ars Technica’s request for comment.

Michael Peroff, an Illinois attorney and founder of Operation Bluebird, said that in the intervening years, more Twitter-like social media networks have sprung up or gained traction—like Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. But none have the scale or brand recognition that Twitter did prior to Musk’s takeover.

“There certainly are alternatives,” Peroff said. “I don’t know that any of them at this point in time are at the scale that would make a difference in the national conversation, whereas a new Twitter really could.”

Similarly, Peroff’s business partner, Stephen Coates, an attorney who formerly served as Twitter’s general counsel, said that Operation Bluebird aims to re-create some of the magic that Twitter once had.

“I remember some time ago, I’ve had celebrities react to my content on Twitter during the Super Bowl or events,” he told Ars. “And we want that experience to come back, that whole town square, where we are all meshed in there.”

Could It Work?

Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion. He eventually changed the company name and brand identity from Twitter to X. That decision, Operation Bluebird says, created an opening for the Twitter name to be formally abandoned.

In July 2023, Musk himself tweeted that “we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand, and gradually, all the birds.”

That was when Peroff, a Chicago-area attorney specializing in trademark and IP law, saw an opportunity not only to claim the name Twitter but also to use the iconic illustrated logo that was affectionately referred to internally as “Larry Bird.”