Disney names Adobe its official AI innovation partner

Adobe has been named the Official AI Innovation Partner of The Walt Disney Company under a multi-year strategic alliance the two companies announced on November 9, 2026, at Adobe MAX in Miami Beach, a deal that has Adobe and Disney co-develop custom generative AI models trained on Disney's own intellectual property.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Under the alliance, Disney gets early access to Adobe Firefly (generative AI for creatives), Adobe Firefly Foundry (proprietary AI models), Adobe Premiere (video editing) and Adobe Photoshop (digital imaging), plus dedicated Adobe engineering and research resources to support the Disney production pipeline, per Adobe's announcement.

Through Firefly Foundry, Disney will work directly with Adobe on models tailored to its properties that Adobe describes as human-centered and artist-led. Trained on character attributes, environments and visual styles, the models are private and proprietary to Disney and produce what Adobe calls "commercially safe and production-ready outputs."

The alliance spans Walt Disney World Resort, Disneyland Resort, Disney Cruise Line, ESPN Edge and StudioLAB, the innovation hub inside The Walt Disney Studios, where Adobe joins as a StudioLAB Innovation Partner. It also covers global marketing activations, industry events and customer storytelling.

"Today's announcement marks the next chapter of the relationship, where the two companies will build a new creative foundation that thoughtfully deploys AI as an accelerant for artistic vision, creativity and guest engagement," said Hannah Elsakr, vice president, GenAI New Business Ventures, Adobe, in a statement.

"By bringing together Disney's world-class storytellers and beloved brands with Adobe's technology, we have an exciting opportunity to give our creative teams new ways to explore and develop their ideas," said Becca Vodnoy, senior vice president, Corporate Alliances, The Walt Disney Company.

The alliance builds on an existing relationship. In June 2026, Adobe said Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development was already using Firefly Foundry for a sketch-to-image model that turns hand-drawn concepts into rendered 2D concept art. Kyle Laughlin, senior vice president of R&D technology and engineering at Disney, told Reuters the tools let teams "compress the creative process that would have taken months to now being able to do that in hours and days," adding they are "in no way meant to replace" roles at Imagineering.

Disney has moved between partnership and litigation on AI. A December 2025 licensing deal to bring more than 200 Disney, Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars characters to OpenAI's Sora, tied to a planned $1 billion Disney investment, fell apart after OpenAI shut Sora down; the deal was never completed and no money changed hands, the Los Angeles Times reported. Disney and other studios sued Midjourney and MiniMax, and in February 2026 Disney sent ByteDance a cease-and-desist letter over its Seedance 2.0 video model.

For creators, the alliance points to licensed, brand-safe models trained on a studio's own catalog as the route Disney is willing to fund, rather than open generation from copyrighted characters.

Co-innovation projects with StudioLAB and ESPN Edge are already underway, and Adobe said additional activations will roll out over the alliance's multi-year term.