MiniMax, a privately-held Chinese company, operates Hailuo AI, a Chinese artificial intelligence (“AI”) image and video generating service, which is marketed as a “Hollywood studio in your pocket;” using intellectual property stolen from Hollywood studios.
“The Hailuo service offers its subscribers an endless supply of infringing images and videos featuring Plaintiffs’ famous copyrighted characters,” said the opening paragraph of the Complaint filed September 16, 2025, in a California US District Court by business units of Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery against the China-based AI service, its parent company, and one of its agents.
The Complaint continued: “MiniMax even uses Plaintiffs’ famous copyrighted characters to advertise and promote its infringing Hailuo service. MiniMax’s copyright infringement is willful and brazen.”
The offending AI platform went straight for the movie industry’s most well-known content. By entering “a simple text prompt requesting particular characters in a particular setting or doing a particular action, it would quickly generate image or video output, visually watermarked with MiniMax and Hailuo AI branding.
While the Studios have asked MiniMax to stop its infringing activities, and can easily implement technologies that can do so, these requests have been ignored.
Big business backed by big business
According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, MiniMax has a market value of $4 billion, has millions of subscribers, and continues to advertise to attract more. Investors into MiniMax include Alibaba and Tencent. The company also filed a listing plan with China’s securities regulator, to go public on the Hong Kong stock exchange.
In addition to its Hailuo AI business, MiniMax released a large language model in June 2025, called MiniMax M1. It’s an open source model licensed under Apache 2.0 and is available both via Microsoft’s GitHub and via the Hugging Face code sharing community.
Ad campaigns
One recent ad campaign uses social media to lure consumers to subscribe to Hailuo AI; enticing them with infringing videos featuring well-known movie characters
Available by subscription
MiniMax is a commercial service offering five levels of paid subscriptions (plus a free level).
4 access Hailuo AI by signing up for a subscription on MiniMax’s website.4 MiniMax offers
5 six different subscription levels.
Charges and implications
MiniMax is alleged to have facilitated direct copyright infringement by generating derivative works directly from studio originals. MiniMax also would also be liable as a contributory infringer because it encourages its users to produce infringing copies.
Typically, complaints such as these set damages at the maximum amount allowed by US statute, which is $150,000 per instance, plus attorneys fees and other costs. In many cases, this produces a ‘plea’ for tens of millions of dollars, which is often left uncollected because the real goal is to put the pirate out of business.
Similarly, in this case, the Complaint says the Plaintiffs are entitled to damages of up to $150,000 per work, but the ‘Prayer for Relief’ does not set a dollar amount for a settlement. It’s difficult to do so, since it’s hard to say how many MiniMax-generated works are out there.
Jurisdiction
Because MiniMax distributes its infringing Hailuo AI service in California, and in the US District Court’s Central California District as an app through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, both operated from California, the Court asserted jurisdication for this case. MiniMax also uses San Francisco-based Cloudflare for caching and distribution over CDN.
Further reading
Complaint. Document #1. Disney, Universal, Warner Bros. (Plaintiffs) vs MiniMax, et al. Filed September 16, 2025. US District Court for the Central District of California.
MPA statement on copyright infringement lawsuit filed today against MiniMax. Press release. September 16, 2025. Motion Picture Association
Alibaba- backed Chinese AI startup files for Hong Kong IPO. July 16, 2025. by Tracy Qu and Rafaele Huang. The Wall Street Journal.
MiniMax-M1 is a new open source model with 1 million token context and new, hyper efficient reinforcement learning. Article. June 16, 2025. by Carl Franzen. VentureBeat
Why it matters
The studios’ Complaint was succinct” MiniMax completely disregards U.S. copyright law and treats Plaintiffs’ valuable copyrighted characters like its own. Not only has it failed to act on Plaintiffs’ requests to adopt the reasonable measures taken by several AI services to avoid infringement, MiniMax has actively engaged in and encouraged infringement.”
“Companies should know that they will be held accountable for infringing on the rights of American creators wherever they are located,” said Charles Rivkin, Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association.
“As we have previously stated, the Motion Picture Association strongly supports copyright protection and our member company efforts to enforce intellectual property rights. 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 Mr. Rivkin
Case 2:25-cv-08768 Document 1 Filed 09/16/25 Page 4 of 119 Page ID #:4
- 1 even uses Plaintiffs’ famous copyrighted characters to advertise and promote its infringing
- 2 Hailuo service. MiniMax’s copyright infringement is willful and brazen.
