Barry Diller rips WGA deal with studios, says fair use needs to be redefined to address AI
Slamming the tentative labor deal between Hollywood writers and studios, media mogul Barry Diller on Tuesday laid out his biggest bone of contention with generative artificial intelligence.
Diller, chairman of IAC and Expedia, called for the law to be redefined to protect published material from capture in artificial intelligence knowledge-bases.
“Fair use needs to redefined because what they have done is sucked up everything and that violates the basis of the copyright law,” Diller said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “All we want to do is establish that there is no such thing as fair use for AI, which gives us standing.”
Diller’s complaints came as prominent authors, including George R.R. Martin and Jodi Picoult, sue OpenAI for copyright infringement. His remarks also followed on the heels of the Writers Guild of America’s tentative agreement with Hollywood studios to end a nearly 150-day strike.
Diller isn’t a fan of the deal.
“They spent months trying to craft words to protect writers from AI and they ended up with a paragraph that protected nothing from no one,” Diller said.
The details of the tentative deal between the WGA and Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers have not yet been made public. Hollywood studios are expected to walk away with the right to use and train AI models using writers’ work, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited unnamed sources familiar with the negotiations. On the other hand, writers are expected to be guarenteed compensation for work they do on scripts, even if the studios employ an AI tool, the Journal added.
Legacy media and AI companies, most notably ChatGPT creator OpenAI, have clashed on what content should be allowed into the knowledge base of generative artificial intelligence. Critics of AI point to the fair use doctrine under U.S. copyright law, which permits limited portions of a work to be used without a license or compensation. Generative AI and language-based model systems index entire bodies of work within their knowledge base, a violation of fair use, some argue.
According to Diller, it’s one of his key points of contention with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI.
“The thing that Sam and I disagree and have talked about is that he believes fair use allows him to take all of a publisher’s [work],” said Diller. “We believe that it doesn’t.”
Altman, who also served on the Expedia board with Diller, testified before senators in May to discuss regulations on AI.
“We think that creators deserve control over how their creations are used, and what happens sort of beyond the point of them releasing it into the world,” Altman said during the hearing. “We need to figure out new ways with this new technology that creators can win, succeed and have a vibrant life, and I’m optimistic that this will present it.”
CNBC has reached out to OpenAI for a response to Diller’s remarks.
Shutterstock, a stock media service and OpenAI partner since 2021, set up a contributors fund for creators which provides compensation if their intellectual property is used during AI content generation. Altman also said that Shutterstock was critical in the training of OpenAI’s generative media AI, DALL-E.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos leaves Aman Venice hotel, on the second day of the wedding festivities of Bezos and journalist Lauren Sanchez, in Venice, Italy, June 27, 2025.
Yara Nardi | Reuters
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos unloaded more than 3.3 million shares of his company in a sale valued at roughly $736.7 million, according to a financial filing on Tuesday.
The stock sale is part of a previously arranged trading plan adopted by Bezos in March. Under that arrangement, Bezos plans to sell up to 25 million shares of Amazon over a period ending May 29, 2026.
Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 but remains chairman, has been selling stock in the company at a regular clip in recent years, though he’s still the largest individual shareholder. He adopted a similar trading plan in February 2024 to sell up to 50 million shares of Amazon stock through late January of this year.
Bezos previously said he’d sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin. He’s also donated shares to Day 1 Academies, his nonprofit that’s building a chain of Montessori-inspired preschools across several states.
The most recent stock sale comes after Bezos and Lauren Sanchez tied the knot last week in a lavish wedding in Venice. The star-studded celebration, which took place over three days and sparked protests from some local residents, was estimated to cost around $50 million.
Bezos is ranked third in Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index with a net worth of about $240 billion. He’s behind Tesla CEO Elon Musk at $363 billion and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at $260 billion.
WATCH: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ wedding sparks Venice protests
Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.
Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images
The Google Doodle is Alphabet’s most valuable piece of real estate, and on Tuesday, the company used that space to promote “AI Mode,” its latest AI search product.
Google’s Chrome browser landing pages and Google’s home page featured an animated image that, when clicked, leads users to AI Mode, the company’s latest search product. The doodle image also includes a share button.
The promotion of AI Mode on the Google Doodle comes as the tech company makes efforts to expose more users to its latest AI features amid pressure from artificial intelligence startups. That includes OpenAI which makes ChatGPT, Anthropic which makes Claude and Perplexity AI, which bills itself as an “AI-powered answer engine.”
Google’s “Doodle” Tuesday directed users to its search chatbot-like experience “AI Mode”
AI Mode is Google’s chatbot-like experience for complex user questions. The company began displaying AI Mode alongside its search results page in March.
“Search whatever’s on your mind and get AI-powered responses,” the product description reads when clicked from the home page.
AI Mode is powered by Google’s flagship AI model Gemini, and the tool has rolled out to more U.S. users since its launch. Users can ask AI Mode questions using text, voice or images. Google says AI Mode makes it easier to find answers to complex questions that might have previously required multiple searches.
In May, Google tested the AI Mode feature directly beneath the Google search bar, replacing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget — a place where Google rarely makes changes.
WATCH: Google buyouts highlight tech’s cost-cutting amid AI CapEx boom
Disposable diapers are a massive environmental offender. Roughly 300,000 of them are sent to landfills or incinerated every minute, according to the World Economic Forum, and they take hundreds of years to decompose. It’s a $60 billion business.
One alternative approach has been compostable diapers, which can be made out of wood pulp or bamboo. But composting services aren’t universally available and some of the products are less absorbent than normal nappies, critics say.
A growing number of parents are also turning to cloth diapers, but they only make up about 20% of the U.S. market.
ZymoChem is attacking the diaper problem from a different angle. Harshal Chokhawala, CEO of ZymoChem, said that 60% to 80% of a typical diaper consists of fossil-based plastics. And half of that is an ingredient called super absorbent polymer, or SAP.
“What we have created is a low carbon footprint bio-based and biodegradable version of this super absorbent polymer,” Chokhawala said.
ZymoChem, with operations in San Leandro, California, and Burlington, Vermont, invented this new type of absorbent by using a fermentation process to convert a renewable resource — sugar — from corn into biodegradable materials. It’s similar to making beer.
“We’re at a point now where we’re very close to being at cost parity with fossil based manufacturing of super absorbents,” said Chokhawala.
The company’s drop-in absorbents can be added into other diapers, which makes it different from environmentally conscious companies like Charlie Banana, Kudos and Hiro, which sell their own brand of diapers.
ZymoChem doesn’t yet have a diaper product on the market. But Lindy Fishburne, managing partner at Breakout Ventures and an investor in the company, says it’s a scalable model.
“Being able to build and grow with biology allows us to unlock a circular economy and a supply chain that is no longer petro-derived, which opens up the opportunities of where you can manufacture and how you secure supply chains,” Fishburne said.
Other investors include Toyota Ventures, GS Futures, KDT Ventures, Cavallo Ventures and Lululemon. The company has raised a total of $35 million.
The Lululemon partnership shows that it’s not just about diapers. ZymoChem’s bio-based materials can also be used in other hygiene products and in bio-based nylon. Lululemon recently said it will use it in some of its leggings, which were traditionally made with petroleum.
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