Anthropic accused three Chinese AI labs of large-scale distillation attacks on Claude, but the internet flipped the narrative into a debate about the industry's own data practices.
A U.S. court order halted OpenAI’s use of the "Cameo" label for Sora’s character-consistency feature, adding naming risk to an already crowded launch cycle.
With fresh capital and a higher valuation, attention moved quickly from fundraising headlines to delivery expectations for enterprise-grade reliability.
Runway announced a $315 million Series E at a reported $5.3 billion valuation, with leadership framing the round around scaling world-model infrastructure and enterprise demand.
Kuaishou announced Kling 3.0 on January 31, featuring native 4K 60fps output, up to six camera cuts per generation with visual consistency, and synchronized audio-visual output in a single pass.
h3h3 Productions and other creators sued Snap in the Central District of California, alleging the company used academic video datasets to train commercial AI features without permission.
In his annual letter, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan announced expanded deepfake detection, likeness tools for creators, and permanent demonetization for channels hiding AI-generated content.
The unlimited AI image and video generation promotion for Firefly Pro and Premium customers ended on January 15, forcing creators back to credit-based usage.
Google DeepMind released Veo 3.1 on January 13, introducing professional 4K upscaling, native 9:16 vertical output, and Scene Extension technology for narratives exceeding 60 seconds.
OpenAI discontinued free access to Sora 2 on January 10, citing unsustainable GPU demand, restricting all video and image generation to Plus and Pro subscribers only.
Tunisian filmmaker Zoubeir ElJlassi won the $1 million Global AI Film Award at the 1 Billion Followers Summit for "Lily," selected from 3,500 entries reviewed by 40 expert judges.
MiniMax, the company behind Hailuo AI video generation, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on January 9, with shares closing up 109% at HK$345 and market cap exceeding $9.8 billion.
HeyGen shipped a rebuilt avatar creation flow, renamed credits to "Premium Credits" with upfront cost estimates, made audio dubbing unlimited, and replaced its Team plan with HeyGen For Business.
Caixin and Reuters reported that a record-setting settlement and surge of 2025 lawsuits have set the stage for court decisions that could redefine how copyright law applies to generative AI.
A wave of California AI laws including AB 621 (deepfake damages up to $250K), AB 2013 (training data transparency), and SB 942 (AI disclosure) went into effect alongside similar legislation in 37 other states.
OpenAI rolled out Sora access to 15 additional countries by the end of December, including Argentina, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam, significantly broadening its international creator base.
Kuaishou disclosed that Kling AI exceeded $20 million in monthly revenue by December 2025, translating to a $240M ARR, with over 60 million creators and 600 million videos generated.
A Guardian-reported study revealed that more than one in five videos recommended to fresh YouTube accounts consisted of low-quality AI-generated content.
IPWatchdog analysis identified three landmark rulings from 2025 on AI training and copyrighted content that will shape how courts treat video-generation cases next year.
John Carreyrou and fellow writers filed suit against six AI companies on December 22, alleging unauthorized use of copyrighted works for model training.
HeyGen's December 2025 release introduced Voice Doctor for chat-based voice refinement, a streamlined avatar management experience, and a new changelog for tracking updates.
Meta disclosed internal development of Mango, a closed-source image and video generation model, alongside a text model codenamed Avocado, breaking from its open-source tradition.
Adobe became Runway's preferred API creativity partner, giving Firefly users exclusive early access to Gen-4.5 with plans for deeper Creative Cloud integration.
D-ID announced a partnership with Microsoft integrating AI-powered avatars into Azure, Teams, and other Microsoft enterprise software, operating at sub-200ms latency across 120+ languages.
Adobe launched a public beta of its browser-based Firefly video editor featuring text-based editing, camera-motion references, and Topaz-powered 4K upscaling.
ByteDance officially released Seedance 1.5 Pro on December 16, introducing joint audio-visual generation that creates video and audio simultaneously from text and image prompts.
Synthesia made its Express-2 engine, combining diffusion-transformer video with cloned voices and natural gestures, available at no extra cost across all paid tiers by December 2025.
Disney announced a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI and a three-year licensing deal bringing Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters to the Sora video generator.
Alongside the GWM-1 launch on December 11, Runway added native audio generation to Gen-4.5, enabling synchronized sound output without external dubbing tools.
The MPA called on OpenAI to take immediate action after copyrighted characters from member studios proliferated in Sora 2 outputs despite stated guardrails.
TikTok's December 4 community guidelines update expanded mandatory labeling for AI-generated content, introduced invisible watermarks via C2PA, and gave users controls to limit AI content in feeds.
Kuaishou launched Kling Video 2.6 with one-pass generation of visuals, voiceovers, sound effects, and ambient atmosphere, eliminating the need for separate audio layering.
Kuaishou unveiled Kling O1, positioning it as the industry's first unified multimodal creation tool that consolidates text, video, image, and subject inputs into a single generation and editing engine.