Hollywood Is Suing an AI Company That Wants to Know If Hollywood Uses AI
AI is everywhere this July 4th weekend — in Google’s holiday ads, in federal courtrooms, and now in pharmaceutical labs. The stories landing today aren’t just about new features. They’re about who controls AI, who profits from it, and who gets to set the rules.
Google Imagined the Founding Fathers Using Gemini. People Had Thoughts.
For Independence Day, Google released a commercial with a simple premise: what if Thomas Jefferson and company had drafted the Declaration of Independence using Google Docs and Gemini, the company’s AI assistant? CEO Sundar Pichai shared the ad himself, framing it as a celebration of American ingenuity. TechCrunch covered the reaction, which was, predictably, mixed.
The ad belongs to Google’s broader “In America” campaign for Workspace, its suite of productivity tools. The idea is that Gemini functions like a smart collaborator — suggesting edits, summarizing ideas, helping you get to a finished draft faster. Applying that to one of history’s most famous documents is a deliberately bold creative choice. Whether it reads as inspiring or as overreach depends entirely on your feelings about AI and about who gets to tell that story.
For most people watching, the ad raises a quiet but real question: if AI can make collaboration faster and easier, what does that mean for work they do themselves? Google is clearly betting that Workspace plus Gemini becomes the default tool for offices and schools. This ad is as much a sales pitch as it is a holiday greeting.
Why this matters: Google is using a cultural moment to normalize AI as a creative partner. That framing — AI as collaborator, not replacement — is the core argument the company wants everyone to absorb.
“Founding Fathers using Gemini AI to draft the Declaration of Independence”
Midjourney Is Asking Disney a Simple Question: Do You Use AI Too?
Midjourney — the company behind a popular AI image-generation tool — is currently being sued for copyright infringement by Disney, Warner Bros., and Universal. The studios argue that Midjourney trained its model on their copyrighted images without permission. Midjourney’s legal team has now fired back with a pointed request: show us your own AI usage records. Variety has details on the legal maneuvering.
The logic is straightforward. If the studios suing Midjourney are themselves using AI tools — possibly trained on similar data — that could complicate their moral and legal standing. In copyright law, the question of who has “clean hands” matters. Midjourney seems to be arguing that the studios can’t position themselves as pure defenders of human creativity if they’re quietly using similar technology behind the scenes.
This affects anyone who works in a creative field. The outcome of this lawsuit will help define whether AI companies can train on existing work without paying for it, and whether the big studios will face any scrutiny for their own AI adoption. TechCrunch’s coverage notes the case is still unfolding, but the discovery request alone puts the studios on the spot.
Why this matters: The studios want to control how AI uses creative work. Midjourney wants the public to see whether those same studios are drawing a line they aren’t willing to stand behind themselves.
“Midjourney seeks to reveal how Disney, Warner Bros., and Universal use AI in their own operations”
Anthropic Is Hiring Biologists and Building Drug Labs
Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, just announced two things at once. First, a new product called Claude Science — a research workbench that pulls together tools scientists already use, automates the tedious work of building charts from data, and generally tries to speed up the research process. Second, and more striking, a drug discovery program aimed at neglected diseases: illnesses that don’t get much pharmaceutical investment because they primarily affect people in lower-income countries.
To do this, according to The Verge, Anthropic is hiring actual biologists and setting up wet labs — physical spaces where scientists run experiments with real biological materials, not just software. This is a significant expansion for a company that, until recently, was focused entirely on building AI models.
Think of it this way: most AI companies build tools and sell them to others. Anthropic is now saying it wants to use its own tools to do science directly. If it works, it could produce treatments for diseases that the traditional pharmaceutical industry has largely ignored.
Why this matters: An AI company moving into drug development is a meaningful shift. If Anthropic succeeds even modestly, it puts pressure on pharmaceutical companies to explain why they haven’t done the same.
“Anthropic launching Claude Science AI workbench and drug discovery program for neglected diseases”
Also Happening in AI
Google also released a new image-generation model called Nano Banana 2 Lite, per Ars Technica, which reportedly produces images in roughly four seconds and is designed to be faster and cheaper than its predecessors. Separately, French AI company Mistral — which builds open-source models, meaning anyone can inspect and modify the underlying code — got a detailed profile in TechCrunch, a useful primer if you’ve been hearing the name and wondering what the fuss is about. Microsoft, meanwhile, released its third annual AI in Education Report showing broad adoption of AI tools in schools, though teachers say they need more support in actually using them well. And over in fan communities, The Verge reports that fanfiction platforms are actively policing AI-written stories, with passionate disagreements about where to draw the line.
What to Watch
The Midjourney lawsuit is the one to track closely. Courts are still working out whether training AI on copyrighted material is legal, and the studios’ own AI usage — once disclosed — could reshape how that argument lands. Watch also for Anthropic’s drug discovery work: if a tech company produces even a promising early-stage compound for a neglected disease in the next 12 to 18 months, it will force a real conversation about what pharmaceutical companies are actually for.