Midjourney demands Hollywood reveal AI usage details in legal fight

In a major escalation of its high-profile copyright battle with Hollywood, Midjourney has filed a motion to turn the tables on the entertainment industry. The AI image generator is asking a US federal court to force Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery to fully disclose their own internal use of generative AI.

The move represents a coordinated “unclean hands” defense strategy, with Midjourney essentially arguing that the studios are aggressively suing them for doing the exact same thing they are quietly practicing behind closed doors.

1. The Legal Battleground

The dispute traces back to mid-2025, when the major Hollywood studios filed lawsuits accusing Midjourney of “brazen theft” and acting as a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.” The studios alleged that the platform allowed users to mass-generate unauthorized, derivative copies of iconic protected characters like Darth Vader, Elsa, Batman, and Superman.

Midjourney has pushed back with a multi-layered defense centered on Fair Use, which has now exploded into a fierce battle over the discovery phase (the pre-trial exchange of evidence).

2. The Discovery Dispute: Consumer vs. Internal AI

In mid-June 2026, a magistrate judge issued a ruling that handed a partial victory to Hollywood. The order stated that the studios only had to disclose information regarding their “consumer-facing” AI tools, effectively shielding their internal R&D, experimental software, and back-end pipelines.

Midjourney is now asking District Judge John Kronstadt to completely overturn that limitation, demanding access to a massive cache of confidential studio data:

• Internal Core Data: Midjourney is seeking the studios’ private AI business plans, research reports, internal training datasets, model weights, and AI presentations delivered to their boards of directors.
• Complete Prompt History: They want the studios to hand over every single prompt their employees have ever entered into Midjourney’s platform, along with the generated outputs—not just the specific prompts the studios highlighted to prove copyright infringement.

3. The “Industry Custom” Defense

Midjourney’s lead attorney, Bobby Ghajar, summarized the core of their legal push in the filing:

“If Plaintiffs are doing the very thing they seek to punish, that evidence goes to the heart of Midjourney’s fair use and unclean hands defenses.”

Midjourney’s legal team argues that if Hollywood studios are actively utilizing image-generation models for internal production workflows—such as storyboarding, visual concept development, or script ideation—and training those internal models on unlicensed media, it proves that scraping and training AI on copyrighted content is an accepted industry custom, even among the copyright holders themselves.

4. Hollywood’s Pushback

The studios’ legal team, led by attorney David Singer, has fiercely opposed the motion, dismissing Midjourney’s demands as an irrelevant “fishing expedition” designed to deflect from the startup’s own public, commercial infractions.

The studios maintain that their lawsuit is not a blanket crusade to crush AI technology or force Midjourney out of business. Instead, they argue their focus is strictly parameter-based: stopping the unauthorized reproduction, public display, and distribution of their trademarked characters without explicit licensing agreements.

Why This Precedent Matters

This discovery fight is being watched incredibly closely across the tech and legal sectors. If the judge grants Midjourney’s request, it will set a massive legal precedent, stripping away corporate anonymity and forcing entertainment conglomerates to pull back the curtain on how heavily they rely on generative AI to build modern television and film.