OpenAI Sora 2 generates videos of popular copyrighted characters (www.theguardian.com)

OpenAI’s new invite-only video generator, Sora 2, sparked controversy after user prompts produced short AI-generated clips of clearly copyrighted characters from shows like SpongeBob, South Park, Pokémon and Rick and Morty. The company initially told studios and agencies they would need to opt out before launch rather than opt in, and relied on a copyright disputes form and case-by-case takedowns to address infringements. In response to backlash, CEO Sam Altman announced plans to give rights holders “more granular control” over whether—and how—their characters can be generated, plus additional guardrails, while acknowledging some edge-case generations will still slip through. For the AI/ML community this episode crystallizes key technical and policy challenges: how to enforce character-level content restrictions at generation time, integrate rights-holder opt-in/opt-out lists, and scale detection/takedown systems for high-volume video synthesis. It also highlights cost and business implications—higher-than-expected per-user generation suggests significant compute and monetization pressures—leading OpenAI to explore revenue-sharing or licensing models with rights holders. Practically, developers will need robust character-blocking filters, provenance/watermarking and better prompt conditioning or constrained decoding techniques to meet legal, ethical and commercial requirements as generative video tools mature.