Business
A Decade-Long Search for a Battery That Can End the Gasoline Era
On a frigid day in early January, as she worked in her office in the Boston suburb of Billerica, Mass., Siyu Huang received a two-word text message.
“Spinning wheels,” it said. Attached was a short video clip showing a car on rollers in an indoor testing center.
To the untrained eye there was nothing remarkable in the video. The car could have been getting its emissions tested at a Connecticut auto repair shop (except it had no tailpipe). But to Ms. Huang, the chief executive of Factorial Energy, the video was a milestone in a quest that had already occupied a decade of her life.
Ms. Huang, her husband, Alex Yu, and their employees at Factorial had been working on a new kind of electric vehicle battery, known as solid state, that could turn the auto industry on its head in a few years — if a daunting number of technical challenges could be overcome.
For Ms. Huang and her company, the battery had the potential to change the way consumers think about electric vehicles, give the United States and Europe a leg up on China, and help save the planet.
Factorial is one of dozens of companies trying to invent batteries that can charge faster, go farther, and make electric cars cheaper and more convenient than gasoline vehicles. Transportation is the biggest source of man-made greenhouse gases, and electric vehicles could be a potent weapon against climate change and urban air pollution.
The video that landed in Ms. Huang’s phone was from Uwe Keller, the head of battery development at Mercedes-Benz, which had been supporting Factorial’s research with money and expertise.
The short clip, of a Mercedes sedan at a research lab near Stuttgart, Germany, signaled that the company had installed Factorial’s battery in a car — and that it could actually make the wheels move.
The test was an important step forward in a journey that had begun while Ms. Huang and Mr. Yu were still graduate students at Cornell University. Until then, all their work had been in laboratories. Ms. Huang was excited that their invention was venturing into the world.
But there was still a long way to go. The Mercedes with a Factorial battery hadn’t yet been taken out on the road. That was the only place the technology really mattered.
Many start-ups have produced solid-state battery prototypes. But no American or European carmaker has put one into a production vehicle and proved that the technology could survive the bumps, vibrations and moisture of the streets. Or if any have, they have kept it a secret.
In late 2023, Mr. Keller, a veteran Mercedes engineer, proposed to Ms. Huang that they try.
“We’re car guys,” Mr. Keller said later. “We believe in things really moving.”
Roots in China
Ms. Huang stands out in a niche dominated by men from Silicon Valley. Some brag about their 100-hour workweeks; she believes in a good night’s sleep. “Having a clear mind to make the right decision is more important than how many hours you work,” she said.
She is approachable and laughs easily, but also projects determination. She works from a sparsely decorated office in Billerica that looks out on a patch of forest crossed by power lines. The furnishings include a plain black bookcase, stocked with a few technical volumes, that she inherited from a previous tenant. Her diplomas from Cornell — a Ph.D. in chemistry and a master’s in business administration — hang on the wall.
Ms. Huang grew up in Nanjing, China, where she was in an elementary school program that had her gather environmental data. The program instilled an interest in chemistry and an awareness of the vehicle exhaust and industrial pollution choking Nanjing’s air. She realized, she recalled, that “we need to grow a planet that’s healthier for human beings.”
In a dormitory at Xiamen University on China’s southern coast, where she studied chemistry, she saw an advertisement for a Swedish exchange program. After spending two years there, she and Alex, whom she had known since they were students in China, were both accepted to doctoral programs in Cornell’s chemistry department. She arrived in Ithaca, N.Y., in 2009 with $3,000, which she had managed to save from her Swedish scholarship. They have both since become U.S. citizens.
They were star students, said Héctor Abruña, a professor at Cornell known for his research in electrochemistry. He still has a picture on his office bookshelf of himself with Mr. Yu and Ms. Huang in their commencement robes.
With an idea that grew out of Dr. Abruña’s lab and some seed money from the State of New York, Mr. Yu and Ms. Huang founded the company that later became Factorial while she was still completing her business degree.
“They are extremely dedicated and extremely bright,” said Dr. Abruña, who continues to advise Factorial. “Straight shooters — zero BS.”
Mr. Yu is now Factorial’s chief technology officer. The company is, in that sense, a family operation. Ms. Huang is reticent about their private life, declining to say even how many children they have.
Initially the company focused on improving the materials that allow batteries to store energy. That changed after Mercedes invested in Factorial in 2021. Mercedes was looking for a bigger technological leap and encouraged Factorial to pursue solid state.
The technology has that name because it eliminates the liquid chemical mixture, known as an electrolyte, that helps transport energy-laden ions inside a battery. Liquid electrolytes are highly flammable. Replacing them with a solid or gelatinlike electrolyte makes batteries safer.
A battery that doesn’t overheat can be charged faster, perhaps in as little time as it takes to fill a car with gasoline. And solid-state batteries pack more energy into a smaller space, reducing weight and increasing range.
But solid-state batteries have one big drawback that explains why you can’t buy a car with one today. Such battery cells are more prone to grow spiky irregularities that cause short circuits. Vast riches await any company that can overcome this problem and develop a battery that is durable, safe and reasonably easy to manufacture.
Despite obvious differences between Factorial and Mercedes — the start-up has a little more than 100 employees, compared with 175,000 — Ms. Huang’s working style meshed with the culture at Mercedes and its roots in Swabia, the region around Stuttgart where people are known for their no-nonsense approach and restraint.
Mr. Keller found Ms. Huang’s low-key, factual manner to be a welcome contrast to the hype and unfulfilled promises that are pervasive in the battery and technology industries. Factorial, he said, “has not been announcing, announcing, announcing and not delivering.”
‘Production hell’
It’s an axiom in the battery business that producing a cool prototype is the easy part. The challenge is figuring out how to make millions of solid-state batteries at a reasonable price.
Factorial confronted that problem in 2022, setting up a small pilot factory in Cheonan, South Korea, a city near Seoul known for its tech industry. The project became, in Ms. Huang’s words, “production hell” — the same phrase Elon Musk used when Tesla was struggling to mass-produce a sedan and nearly went bankrupt.
To make money, a battery factory can’t produce too many defective cells. Ideally the yield, the percentage of usable cells, should be at least 95 percent. Hitting that target is devilishly difficult, involving volatile chemicals and fragile separators layered and packaged into cells with zero margin for error. The machinery doing all this is encased in Plexiglas chambers and overseen by workers dressed in head-to-toe protective gear to prevent contamination.
Dozens of companies are trying to mass-produce solid-state cells, including big carmakers like Toyota and smaller ones like QuantumScape, a Silicon Valley start-up backed by Volkswagen. Mercedes, hedging its bets, is also working with ProLogium, a Taiwanese company.
Nio, a Chinese carmaker, sells a vehicle with what it advertises as a solid-state battery. Analysts say the technology is less advanced than what Factorial is developing, offering fewer advantages in weight and performance. But there is little doubt that Chinese companies are investing heavily in solid state. Nio did not respond to a request for comment.
Every company has its own closely guarded recipes and manufacturing processes. “It’s difficult to say which technology will win,” said Xiaoxi He, a technology analyst at IDTechEx, a research firm.
Partly because solid-state batteries are so difficult to manufacture, many auto executives are skeptical that they will make commercial sense anytime soon. Shares in many solid-state battery start-ups have plunged, and management turmoil is common.
Factorial has insulated itself from the harsh judgments of Wall Street by never selling stock. Its funding comes from private investors including WAVE Equity Partners, a Boston firm, and partners that include the South Korean automaker Hyundai Motor; and Stellantis, which next year plans to test Factorial batteries in Dodge Charger muscle cars. It also has a partnership with LG Chem, a South Korean company that makes battery materials.
Projections of how soon solid-state batteries would be available have proved overly optimistic. Toyota displayed a futuristic prototype in 2020, but the company is still years away from selling a car with a solid-state battery.
Kurt Kelty, a vice president at General Motors in charge of batteries, is among those who will believe it when they see it. “We’re not banking on solid state,” Mr. Kelty said.
‘I don’t even know if we can make it’
In the beginning, Factorial’s prototype assembly line in South Korea had a yield of just 10 percent, meaning 90 percent of its batteries were faulty. Despite her preference for a good night’s sleep, Ms. Huang often had to wake up at 4 a.m. to deal with problems at the factory, which was operating around the clock. She was in South Korea at least once a month.
“There were always issues,” she said. “There was a point, I was like, I don’t even know if we can make it.”
By 2023, Factorial had produced enough cells suitable for an automobile that Mr. Keller, a soft-spoken, amiable man who has worked at Mercedes for 25 years, began thinking about installing them in a car. The cost and the risk of failure were high enough that he sought approval from his bosses. Armed with PowerPoint slides, Mr. Keller went to Ola Källenius, an imposing Swede who is chief executive at Mercedes.
Mr. Källenius’s office is at the top of a glass and steel high-rise in the middle of a sprawling manufacturing and development complex beside the Neckar River in Stuttgart.
Mr. Keller argued that road testing would help determine, among other things, whether the batteries would work with air cooling alone. If so, that would eliminate the need for a heavier, more costly liquid-cooled system.
Mr. Källenius signed off on the project, reasoning that a tangible goal would motivate the team and hasten development. He drew an analogy to Formula 1 racing. “If you’re chasing the leader, and suddenly you can see him, you get faster,” Mr. Källenius recalled.
Ms. Huang was a bit surprised when, in late 2023, Mr. Keller told her that Mercedes wanted to put the cells in a working vehicle. “We didn’t realize it was coming so soon, honestly speaking,” she said with a laugh.
But by June 2024, Factorial had managed to produce enough high-quality cells to announce that it had begun delivering them to Mercedes. In November, the factory in South Korea hit 85 percent yield, the best result yet. Ms. Huang and the Korean team celebrated by going out to a barbecue joint.
Mercedes still had to figure out how to package the cells in a way that would protect them from highway dirt and moisture. And it had to integrate the battery pack into a vehicle, connecting it to the car’s control systems.
The Factorial cells had one big drawback that made them hard to install in a car. They expanded when charged and shrank when discharged. In Mr. Keller’s words, they “breathed.”
Mr. Keller turned to engineers on the Mercedes Formula 1 racing team, who are accustomed to quickly solving technical problems. They devised a mechanism that expanded and shrank with the cells, maintaining constant pressure.
By Christmas 2024, a team working at Mercedes’s main research center in Sindelfingen, outside Stuttgart, texted Mr. Keller those two words: “spinning wheels.”
‘Finally I see you’
Mr. Keller confessed that he got a little emotional when his team sent him the video of the car. He waited until after Christmas to forward it to Ms. Huang with the same two words.
Several weeks later, the Mercedes engineers took the car with Factorial’s battery, an otherwise standard EQS electric sedan, to a company track for its first road test.
The engineers drove the car slowly at first. They carefully monitored technical data displayed on the dashboard screen.
They drove faster and faster until, by the fourth day, they reached autobahn speeds of 100 miles per hour. The battery didn’t blow up. In theory, it can power the car for 600 miles, more than most conventional cars can travel on a tank of gasoline.
Mr. Keller had been keeping Ms. Huang apprised of the progress, but she was still surprised when, during a meeting on marketing strategy in February, people from the Mercedes communications department mentioned that they had written a news release announcing the achievement.
“Do you want to take a look?” they asked.
She certainly did. The first successful road test with a Factorial battery was an enormously important moment, one they had been anticipating for years. Yet the teams at Mercedes and Factorial did not throw parties to celebrate. They still had work to do.
The next step is to equip a fleet of Mercedes vehicles with batteries, perfect the manufacturing process and do the testing required to begin selling them. That will probably take until 2028, at least. Many experts don’t expect cars with solid-state batteries to be widely available until 2030, at the earliest.
In April, Ms. Huang finally found time to travel to Stuttgart and ride in the car herself.
It was a clear spring day, with greenery sprouting in the German countryside and flowers beginning to bloom. Mercedes employees escorted her to a garage in Sindelfingen, where the automaker also has a large factory complex.
Ms. Huang had seen many photos of the car, but she still felt a thrill when the garage doors opened. It felt “like a long-lost friend,” she said. “Like, ‘Finally I see you!’”
A Mercedes driver took her for a spin on the test track, zooming down an asphalt straightaway then around a banked curve that, Ms. Huang said, felt like a roller coaster.
Inside the car, there was no way to perceive the difference with the Factorial battery compared with a conventional one. “But it’s just so special because it’s with our battery.”
Among the government programs that produce more confusion than benefits, H-1B visas are right up there.
If you’ve been hearing about H-1B visas, it’s probably because President Trump abruptly changed its rules with a proclamation on Sept. 19.
As is typical of Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip policy-making, the proclamation produced an outbreak of fear and chaos, in this case among holders of the visas. That’s because it seemed at first that the administration was imposing a $100,000 fee not only on applicants for the visas, but on current holders reentering the U.S. from abroad, say from home leave or a business trip.
This is a de facto ban, as few organizations will be able to afford it.
— Robert D. Atkinson, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Until the White House clarified that the charge would be a one-time fee for new H-1B applications, not charged annually or for renewals or reentry, holders were advised by some employers not to leave the U.S. for the present; those who were caught off-guard overseas scurried to get home by Sunday, when the fee began.
A Sept. 19 Emirates flight from San Francisco to Dubai had to abort its departure to allow several panicky passengers to debark, according to Bloomberg.
The administration’s subsequent assurances have quelled the panic. But the proclamation has created new befuddlements, including over whether it opens the door to illicit dealings between Trump and companies bidding for the visas, and whether it’s even legal.
As my colleagues Queenie Wong and Nilesh Christopher reported, there are concerns that “a selective application of the fee could be a way the White House can reward its friends and punish its detractors.”
Importantly, there’s room to question whether the proclamation will solve long-standing problems with H-1B visas. So let’s take a look at the program’s malodorous history.
H-1B visas were created in 1990, under President George H.W. Bush, to relieve what high-tech companies asserted was a chronic shortage of U.S.-born workers in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math).
The idea was to give highly-skilled foreign workers in “specialty occupations” the right to three years of U.S. residence renewable for a further three years — an opportunity to obtain permanent residency or even citizenship.
After a few rounds of tweaking, the annual cap on new applications was set at 85,000, including 20,000 holders of advanced degrees from U.S. universities. Higher education and nonprofit research institutions are exempt from the cap.
Things didn’t work out as anticipated. U.S. employers came to see the H-1B visas as tools to replace native-born technicians with cheaper foreign workers. Scandalously, some of the American workers were required as conditions of their severance to train the newcomers to do their jobs.
I documented that practice at Southern California Edison in 2015. The giant utility acknowledged that the outsourcing of workers would cost the jobs of 500 technicians who did the work of installing, maintaining and managing Edison’s computer hardware and software for payroll and billing, dispatching and electrical load management.
Essentially, Edison was replacing domestic IT specialists earning $80,000 to $160,000 with workers provided by two India-based outsourcing firms, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, which were paying their recruits $65,000 to $71,000. By the time the outsourcing process was complete, Edison said, its IT expenses would fall by about 20%.
“They told us they could replace one of us with three, four, or five Indian personnel and still save money,” one laid-off Edison worker told me at the time, recounting a group meeting with supervisors. “They said, ‘We can get four Indian guys for cheaper than the price of you.’ You could hear a pin drop in the room.”
Then there’s the University of California, which announced in 2016 that it would lay off 49 career IT staffers and eliminate 48 other IT jobs that were vacant or filled by contract employees. The American workers were ordered to train their own replacements, who were employees of the Indian outsourcing firm HCL Technologies.
Although the visa law specified that hiring foreign workers would not harm American workers, “the H-1B program is most definitely harming American workers, harming them badly, and on a large scale,” Ronil Hira of Howard University, an expert in the visa program, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2015. “Most of the H-1B program is now being used to import cheaper foreign guestworkers, replacing American workers, and undercutting their wages.”
The high-tech industry’s dirty little secret, I reported, was that the STEM shortage was a myth. The same companies wringing their hands over the supposed dearth of STEM-qualified workers were simultaneously laying them off by the tens of thousands. Indeed, experts in technology employment consistently found that “the supply of graduates is substantially larger than the demand for them in industry,” one told me. Anyway, a significant portion of H-1B recruits weren’t in jobs demanding unique skills, but workaday technicians.
Since 2020, the top employer of H-1B visa holders has been Amazon, with a total of 43,375 workers over that period — followed closely by the Indian outsource companies Infosys and Tata. In the current fiscal year, Amazon reigns, with more than 14,000 H-1B holders, followed by Tata, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Apple and Google. I asked Amazon why it needs so many foreign workers and what work they do, but didn’t receive a reply.
The Indian outsourcing firms have dominated the H-1B system since at least 2009. For years their role has stoked controversy, in part because their employment practices have come under question.
In court, government prosecutors and civil plaintiffs have alleged that Infosys and Tata were exploiting the guest workers they brought to the U.S. Infosys settled federal fraud charges with a $34-million payment in 2013, the largest penalty in an immigration case at that time. The company denied the allegations.
That same year, Tata settled a class action lawsuit with a $29.8-million payment. The plaintiffs alleged that workers imported by Tata were forced to sign over their federal and state tax refunds to Tata, among other claims. The company didn’t admit wrongdoing.
Over the years, the H-1B program has made for political controversy, though Congress hasn’t taken a firm hand in correcting its issues. Conservatives and progressives alike have found reason to complain that it undermines domestic employment. Near the end of his first term, Trump shut down H-1B issuance entirely, along with some other specialty visa programs, but his initiative was blocked in federal court.
But the program remains enormously popular in the high-tech world, which has long agitated for an expansion. Its fans include Elon Musk, who tweeted in December that “the reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H-1B.” He underscored his position with a burst of profanity, but he did promise to “go to war on this issue,” although he acknowledged that some fixing is in order.
That brings us to the issues with Trump’s proclamation. Its shortcomings resemble those that prompted federal Judge Jeffrey S. White of Oakland to overturn Trump’s ban in 2020 in a case brought by the National Assn. of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, among others.
White ruled that the authority to change the terms of the visas belonged to Congress, not the president, and that the administration hadn’t evaluated the effect of the ban on the domestic economy, as federal law required. The case was rendered moot when Trump’s ban was reversed by President Biden. I asked the White House if it was concerned that this proclamation could also be blocked in court, but got no reply.
A bigger question concerns the ramifications of the $100,000 fee. “H-1B visa fees of this magnitude will strongly discourage the hiring of the most talented members of the global labor force,” says University of Chicago economist Steven Durlauf. Instead, the policy will create incentives to move high-tech and scientific activity to other countries, effectively offshoring economic activity that should occur in the U.S., he says.
The fee is so high that only the biggest and richest employers will be able to pay it, locking out small start-ups that have tried to use H-1B visas to build their professional teams. The proclamation doesn’t make clear whether universities and research institutions will be exempt from the fee. Even financially well-endowed universities would find it hard to justify paying $100,000 to import a faculty member from abroad.
“This is a de facto ban, as few organizations will be able to afford it,” says Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a high-tech think tank.
The White House says it intends to replace the current system, a random lottery apportioning available H-1B slots among all applicants, with one favoring applications to fill the highest-paid slots.
The proclamation states that H-1B abuses “present a national security threat by discouraging Americans from pursuing careers in science and technology, risking American leadership in these fields.” Never mind that students considering careers in scientific and technical fields are being profoundly discouraged by Trump’s freezes on research funding across the scientific landscape.
So the bottom line is that, as is usual, Trump’s H-1B policy works at cross-purposes with his other initiatives. For decades, the H-1B program has been ripe for fixing. If only the Trump White House took the time to craft a sensible repair.
ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show on Wednesday after conservatives expressed outrage over a monologue the host had given two days earlier.
Here’s an excerpt from Mr. Kimmel’s monologue:
“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.
The suspension was the latest demonstration of how members of the Trump administration have been able to influence the operations of media companies without imposing new policies. In this case, a broadcaster that is pursuing a $6 billion merger, which must be approved by the Federal Communications Commission, put pressure on ABC before the network’s parent company, Disney, announced its decision to suspend Mr. Kimmel’s show.
1:00 p.m. E.T. on Wednesday, Aug. 5
Podcast video circulates of the F.C.C. chairman threatening ABC and calling on local affiliates to pull Mr. Kimmel’s program.
Hours before ABC made the announcement, the F.C.C. chairman, Brendan Carr, said on a right-wing podcast that local ABC stations should “push back” and “pre-empt” coverage that does not serve “their local communities.” (Pre-empting, in broadcast terms, refers to replacing programming with another show in advance of its airing.)
Mr. Carr also told the podcast’s host, Benny Johnson, that the F.C.C. might take action against ABC.
“When you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action frankly on Kimmel or you know there’s going to be additional work for the F.C.C. ahead. …”
“I think that it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, ‘Listen, we are going to pre-empt.’”
6:11 p.m.
Nexstar, which owns ABC affiliate stations, announces it will not air Mr. Kimmel’s program.
After the podcast interview, Nexstar, which owns 32 ABC affiliate stations, announced that it would “pre-empt ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ for the foreseeable future,” and added: “Nexstar strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk.”
Nexstar has good reason to try to appease the F.C.C. at the moment: In August, the company announced that it intended to buy one of its competitors, Tegna, which owns 13 ABC affiliate stations. But in order for the deal to go through, Mr. Carr and the F.C.C. would have to not only approve it, but also potentially raise the nationwide cap on the percentage of households a single entity’s television stations are allowed to reach.
Broadcasters have pushed the government for decades to raise or repeal the cap, which is currently set at 39 percent. If the Nexstar-Tegna deal goes through, Nexstar’s reach is likely to exceed the limit.
Shortly after Nexstar’s announcement, Sinclair, a company that owns 31 ABC affiliate stations, said it would also suspend Mr. Kimmel’s program.
Of ABC’s 205 affiliate stations, 63 are owned by Nexstar and Sinclair, and another 13 are owned by Tegna.
Together, they make up about 37 percent of all of ABC’s local affiliates.
Approximately 6:30 p.m.
ABC says it will suspend Mr. Kimmel’s program “indefinitely.”
Minutes after Nexstar’s announcement, and just hours after Mr. Carr’s podcast appearance, ABC announced that it was suspending Mr. Kimmel’s program “indefinitely.”
It was unclear how big a role, if any, the plans for pre-empting by Nexstar played in Disney’s decision. (Sinclair did not publicly announce that it would also pre-empt the program until after Disney’s decision was made public.)
7:00 p.m.
F.C.C. chairman thanks Nexstar on social media, shortly after the company announced it would pre-empt Mr. Kimmel.
“I want to thank Nexstar for doing the right thing.”
As the outrage over Mr. Kimmel’s comments grew, Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, along with a close lieutenant, had been hearing from worried advertisers, people familiar with the decision told The New York Times this week.
Last year, Mr. Trump sued ABC’s news division for defamation. ABC settled with the president in December, a rare and significant concession by a major news organization as the president grew increasingly antagonistic to media companies he viewed as critical of him and his allies.
Before Mr. Kimmel’s show was set to begin taping Wednesday, the people familiar with Disney’s decision said, executives had grown concerned that another opening monologue could further inflame the situation. So they made the call for the show to go dark — at least temporarily.
Business
Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery sue Chinese AI firm as Hollywood's copyright battles spread
Walt Disney Co., Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Discovery on Tuesday sued a Chinese artificial intelligence firm called MiniMax for copyright infringement, alleging its AI service generates famous characters including Darth Vader, the Minions and Wonder Woman without the studios’ permission.
“MiniMax’s bootlegging business model and defiance of U.S. copyright law are not only an attack on Plaintiffs and the hard-working creative community that brings the magic of movies to life, but are also a broader threat to the American motion picture industry,” the companies state in their complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
The entertainment companies requested that MiniMax be restrained from further infringement. They are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, as well as attorney fees and costs.
This is the latest round of copyright lawsuits that major studios have brought against AI companies over intellectual property concerns. In June, Disney and Universal Pictures sued AI firm Midjourney for copyright infringement. This month, Warner Bros. Discovery also sued Midjourney.
Shanghai-based MiniMax has a service called Hailuo AI, which is marketed as a “Hollywood studio in your pocket” and used characters including the Joker and Groot in its ads without the studios’ permission, the studios’ lawsuit says. Users can type in a text prompt requesting characters such as Yoda from “Star Wars” or DC Comics’ Superman, and Hailuo AI can pull up high quality and downloadable images or video of the character, according to the document.
“MiniMax completely disregards U.S. copyright law and treats Plaintiffs’ valuable copyrighted characters like its own,” the lawsuit states. “MiniMax’s copyright infringement is willful and brazen.”
“Given the rapid advancement in technology in the AI video generation field … it is only a matter of time until Hailuo AI can generate unauthorized, infringing videos featuring Plaintiffs’ copyrighted characters that are substantially longer, and even eventually the same duration as a movie or television program,” the lawsuit states.
MiniMax did not immediately return a request for comment.
Hollywood is grappling with significant challenges, including the threat of AI, as companies consolidate and reduce their expenses amid rising production costs. Many actors and writers, still recovering from strikes that took place in 2023, are scrambling to find jobs. Some believe the growth of AI has threatened their livelihoods as tech tools can replicate copyrighted characters with text prompts.
Although some studios have sued AI companies, others are looking for ways to partner with them. For example, Lionsgate has partnered with AI startup Runway to help with behind the scenes processes such as storyboarding.
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