Gemini won’t let you make images with Disney characters

Disney and OpenAI reached a groundbreaking deal that granted the AI company access to Disney’s intellectual property, characters, and imagery for image and video generation. Shortly before the agreement became public on December 11, 2025, Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, asking the company to “immediately cease further copying, publicly displaying, publicly performing, distributing, and creating derivative works of Disney’s copyrighted characters.” Now, Google is taking the major step of blocking all Disney-related generation requests in Gemini and Nano Banana, as first reported by Deadline and confirmed by Android Authority.

Currently, Gemini will deny generating images of any Disney-related characters and imagery. “I can’t generate the image you requested right now due to concerns from third-party content providers,” the chatbot responds. “Please edit your prompt and try again.”

In our testing, Gemini denied both explicit and subtle generation requests to create images of Disney-owned brands and properties. Gemini can still create characters and imagery related to brands not owned by Disney — we successfully generated Nano Banana images of Shrek, whose IP is owned by DreamWorks and NBCUniversal. It’s worth noting that in the immediate days and weeks following Disney’s cease-and-desist letter, Gemini still generated images of Disney characters, as we confirmed in chats on December 13 and December 23.

Around the time the Disney letter was sent, a Google spokesperson told Ars Technica: “We have a longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship with Disney, and will continue to engage with them. More generally, we use public data from the open web to build our AI and have built additional innovative copyright controls like Google-extended and Content ID for YouTube, which give sites and copyright holders control over their content.”

As of now, only OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sora will be able to create officially-licensed images and videos using Disney characters. The three-year licensing agreement gives OpenAI the reigns to generate images related to over 250 characters from brands like Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars.