Warner Bros. sues Midjourney for AI-generated images of Superman, Bugs
Bunny and other characters
[September 06, 2025] By
MATT O'BRIEN
Warner Bros. is suing artificial intelligence company Midjourney for
copyright infringement, alleging that the startup enables its millions
of subscribers to create AI-generated images and videos of copyrighted
characters like Superman and Bugs Bunny.
It's the third big Hollywood studio to sue Midjourney in Los Angeles
federal court after Disney and Universal filed a joint lawsuit in June.
Midjourney, based in San Francisco, didn't respond to requests for
comment.
The lawsuit alleges Midjourney trained its AI system on “illegal copies”
of Warner Bros. works and encourages its users to pick iconic characters
like Batman, Wonder Woman, Scooby-Doo or the Powerpuff Girls and create
downloaded images and videos of those characters in “every imaginable
scene.”
Even a generic prompt for the AI tool to produce a “classic comic book
superhero battle” will generate high-quality images of DC Studios
figures such as Superman, Batman and Flash, according to the lawsuit.
Warner Bros. says “Midjourney thinks it is above the law” and “could
easily stop its theft and exploitation” of intellectual property in the
same way it sets limits on violence or nudity.
The lawsuit alleges Midjourney's practices create “consumer confusion
regarding what is lawful and what is not lawful by misleading its
subscribers to believe that Midjourney’s massive copying and the
countless infringing images and videos generated by its Service are
somehow authorized by Warner Bros. Discovery.”
The entertainment giant says it is entitled to up to $150,000 in damages
per infringed work.
Midjourney has denied copyright infringement allegations in the Disney
and Universal case, arguing in an August court filing that while its AI
tool “had to be trained on billions of publicly available images,” it
did so “in order to learn visual concepts” and how they correspond to
language.
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 “Training a generative AI model to
understand concepts by extracting statistical information embedded
in copyrighted works is a quintessentially transformative fair use –
a determination resoundingly supported by courts that have
considered the issue,” said Midjourney’s response, citing recent
court rulings in lawsuits by published authors against Anthropic and
Facebook parent Meta.
Midjourney also said the onus was on its customers to follow
Midjourney’s terms of use, which prohibit infringing intellectual
property rights.
In a 2022 interview with The Associated Press, Midjourney CEO David
Holz described his image-making service as “kind of like a search
engine” pulling in a wide swath of images from across the internet.
He compared copyright concerns about the technology with how such
laws have adapted to human creativity.
“Can a person look at somebody else’s picture and learn from it and
make a similar picture?” Holz said. “Obviously, it’s allowed for
people and if it wasn’t, then it would destroy the whole
professional art industry, probably the nonprofessional industry
too. To the extent that AIs are learning like people, it’s sort of
the same thing and if the images come out differently then it seems
like it’s fine.”
The Motion Picture Association endorsed the Warner Bros. lawsuit in
a statement Friday.
“We remain concerned that copyright infringement, left unchecked,
threatens the entire American motion picture industry, which
supports over 2 million jobs in all 50 states and drives countless
economic, social, and cultural benefits,” said MPA CEO Charles
Rivkin.
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