Nolan Tells Studios to Own the AI Copyright Fight: ‘It’s Down to the Studios’
Christopher Nolan has told Hollywood’s studios that the next fight over artificial intelligence is theirs to wage — not the directors’.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker, who has served as president of the Directors Guild of America since last autumn, said on Saturday that the guild cannot police the use of films as AI training data because it does not hold the copyrights. That responsibility, he argued, sits squarely with the studios that own them.
“We’re very focused at the guild about holding the studios to account for protecting their copyrights. We can’t do that,” Nolan said on the “Hollywood Insiders” podcast, as TheWrap reported. “With very few exceptions in the guild, we are not the copyright holders of the films that we’ve worked on. It’s down to the studios to do that.”
A guild that can bargain — but cannot sue
Nolan’s point is a legal one as much as a political one. The DGA has already negotiated protections governing AI inside film and television production: its agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, reached in June, renewed rules requiring guild-covered work to be performed by a person, and members ratified the four-year deal later that month.
But those are workplace protections. They govern how films are made, not how finished films are used afterwards. When an AI company trains a model on a copyrighted film, the only party with standing to bring an infringement claim is the rights holder — and in Hollywood, that is almost always the studio.
That distinction matters to directors’ livelihoods as well. “Our income, our residuals, depends on the appropriate monetization of those copyrights,” Nolan said, arguing that if studios let their catalogues be used without payment or permission, the value underpinning directors’ pay erodes with them.
The Odyssey’s credits carry the warning
Nolan pointed to his own film as evidence that studios can act. The closing credits of The Odyssey, Universal’s epic that recently passed $1.17 billion worldwide to become the studio’s biggest international release, now carry boilerplate language stating that the film cannot be ingested, scraped or used as training data for generative AI models.
“I was very pleased to see that the boilerplate at the end of The Odyssey contains, for the first time, a message saying that this film cannot be ingested and used as training data,” Nolan said on the podcast, which is hosted by producer and former Academy president Hawk Koch and produced by the Motion Picture & Television Fund.
He described the notice as a first — a concrete step by a major studio production, rather than a statement of principle. Whether such a credit notice carries legal force on its own is untested, but Nolan presented it as a model other productions could follow.
‘AI is too big a catchall term’
Nolan also pushed back against the way the technology is discussed, arguing that vague language lets companies avoid responsibility for how their systems are built and used.
“AI is too big a catchall term,” he said. “It’s describing too many things. It’s being used by companies to absolve themselves of responsibility.”
He said existing law already protects creators, and predicted that the fair-use arguments AI companies rely on to justify training on copyrighted work would not survive in court over the longer term. “I think longer term that won’t hold up in court,” he said. “There have already been some significant judgments against it.”
The legal picture is more mixed than that suggests. The U.S. Copyright Office’s May 2025 report on AI training offered a conditional framework, finding that some training uses may qualify as fair use and others may not, depending on the circumstances. Courts are still working through the question case by case, and no single ruling has settled it.
What comes next for the studios
Nolan, who served on the DGA’s Artificial Intelligence Committee before his election as president last September, framed copyright enforcement as the guild’s next phase — after the bargaining table, the courtroom and the licensing desk.
For the studios, that presents a choice. They can treat AI training rights as a formal licensing question, negotiating payment for the use of their catalogues, or they can pursue infringement claims against unauthorised use. What Nolan made clear is that, in his view, they cannot leave the question to the directors who made the films.
The DGA’s leverage is indirect: it can keep pressing its studio partners in bargaining and in public, and it can point to The Odyssey as proof that protective language can be put on screen. But the lawsuits, if they come, will carry studio names on them — not the guild’s.
