Netflix Acquires an AI Studio as Labels Sign AI Licenses

Record labels sign licenses, Netflix buys an AI team

On March 5, 2026, Netflix announced it would acquire InterPositive, a company founded by actor-director Ben Affleck that builds AI tools for filmmaking.

There’s been movement in the music industry too. Among the record labels that had sued the AI music services Suno and Udio, UMG and Warner started announcing licensing agreements in the second half of 2025. They’ve begun deciding what rights to grant for AI training and music generation, and how to compensate for them.

Watching these cases, what caught my attention was how entertainment companies are moving to set the terms of AI use themselves. Lawsuits, licensing deals, and acquiring development teams are all methods toward that end. But not every company progresses through these steps in this order — depending on which rights they want to protect and what technology they need, companies can use several of these approaches at once.

The dispute was over the right to use music for training

In June 2024, record labels under Sony, UMG, and Warner filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Suno and Udio. Their claim was that the companies had copied music they owned without permission to train AI. The complaint filed against Suno included examples of outputs allegedly resembling existing recordings. These were claims made by the plaintiffs at the time.

In its August 2024 statement, Suno acknowledged training on music available on the open internet, but pushed back against the claim that this training constituted copyright infringement. Whether music can be collected from public sources and whether that use is permissible turned out to be separate questions.

Business continued through the legal dispute. In its November 2025 funding announcement, Suno disclosed that it had raised $250 million at a $2.45 billion post-money valuation. The company also stated that roughly 100 million users had made music on the platform over the past two years. That figure represents the company’s reported cumulative usage, not monthly active users.

In the film and TV industry, how to handle digital replicas of actors became a central issue. Following the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, subsequent contracts incorporated AI-related protections. The music training-data lawsuits and actors’ labor contracts involve different parties and different rights, but they’re worth considering together—both grapple with whose consent is required when AI is used in creative work.

The settlement is a contract that rewrites training and usage terms

UMG and Udio announced an agreement on October 29, 2025. It resolves the two companies’ lawsuit and lays out plans to launch a new platform in 2026 built on AI trained with licensed music. The deal covers licensing for both sound recordings and music publishing.

While transitioning to the new service, Udio agreed to run its existing service in a limited way. Its user notice at the time also announced that downloads would be suspended. So this settlement wasn’t just a financial matter between companies — it affected where users could listen to the tracks they’d created, and whether they could take them elsewhere.

Warner announced separate agreements with Udio on November 19 and Suno on November 25. Both deals address the shift toward services using licensed music, but the specific terms differ.

Warner’s announcement with Suno includes a provision letting artists and songwriters choose whether their name, likeness, voice, and compositions can be used in AI-generated music. Suno also said it plans to launch a new licensing model in 2026 and retire its current model. Downloads will be allowed for paid accounts, but with a monthly cap.

These settlements haven’t resolved every dispute. Contracts apply only to the parties involved and to a defined scope of rights. The fact that a major label agreed doesn’t mean other rights holders have consented too. And how much individual musicians get paid, and on what basis, is something that requires a closer look at the actual contracts and payouts.

Netflix Brought In a Team That Builds Production Tools

Netflix’s acquisition of InterPositive is a case of bringing technology and development talent in-house. Netflix stated in its official announcement that the entire team is joining, with Affleck taking on a role as senior advisor.

According to Affleck’s explanation, InterPositive built tools tailored to problems that arise on set. On controlled shoots, they created their own training materials and tackled issues that need fixing during production, like swapping backgrounds or correcting bad lighting. The focus was on maintaining visual logic on screen and consistency in editing.

This work connects to post-production—editing, color correction, visual effects—that happens after filming wraps. The idea is to help directors and cinematographers better achieve the results they’re after. Having secured its own footage does help manage where the data comes from, but that alone doesn’t resolve every copyright and labor-related issue.

A week before the announcement, on February 26, Netflix said it would not raise its offer in the bidding war for Warner Bros. The timing stands out: announcing an AI company acquisition right after stepping back from a major bidding war. Still, the mere proximity of the two events isn’t enough to conclude that InterPositive was a substitute for Warner Bros.

Oswarld’s Lens

I see the music label’s licensing deal and Netflix’s acquisition as two different bets. The label wants to set the terms and revenue for how the music it manages gets used, while Netflix wants to bring the technology it needs for production in-house.

The label’s bet rests on the assumption that existing music and artist names will still carry value inside AI services. If users want to make new music using the voice or songs of an artist they love, whoever holds the rights has a business opportunity. But it’s still an open question how willingness to pay for existing music will shift as AI-generated music proliferates. Generation volume or cumulative user counts alone won’t give us the answer.

What catches my attention with Netflix is Affleck’s role. Someone who has worked as both an actor and a director designing the tool—and staying involved after the acquisition—lends credibility to the claim that the tool reflects what production actually needs.

The timing of labor negotiations is also worth watching. SAG-AFTRA has announced that negotiations for a new contract begin on February 9, 2026, with the current contract expiring on June 30, 2026. I think Netflix emphasizing creator involvement at this moment could help ease the concerns of its negotiating counterpart. That’s my interpretation of what the announcement means—it hasn’t been confirmed that labor negotiations were a hidden motive behind the acquisition.

Of course, having well-known creators involved doesn’t guarantee benefits for every worker on set. We need to check who decides whether the tool gets used, who edits and takes responsibility for the output, and who captures the gains from reduced time and cost. How much the tool actually improves quality on real productions, and what it does to jobs, are also things we still need to watch.

The reason I keep tracking these cases isn’t whether AI gets used, but that the terms of its use are becoming concrete. What matters, I think, is whether the people who actually make the music and shoot the footage—not just labels, tech companies, and studios—get a seat at the table where those terms are set.

References

• Netflix’s InterPositive acquisition announcement, March 5, 2026.
• UMG–Udio agreement announcement, October 29, 2025.
• Warner–Udio agreement announcement, November 19, 2025.
• Warner–Suno agreement announcement, November 25, 2025.
• U.S. Copyright Office’s AI report page. Part 3, which covers training, was released as a pre-publication version on May 9, 2025. Read it separately from individual court rulings on specific disputes.
• SAG-AFTRA’s guidance on preparing for 2026 negotiations, December 18, 2025.

The author is Oswarld (Kwangseob Ahn). Current roles: Adjunct Professor at Sejong University, Strategy Consultant at INLEVEL9. Career, research, books, and recent work are kept current on the About page. Latest · July 2026: HEMA-2: A Consolidation-Aware Tri-Memory Architecture with Multi-Channel Scheduling for Lifelong Conversational AI.