Christopher Nolan is urging Hollywood to put the next AI copyright fight where the copyrights usually sit: with the studios.
On the Nov. 7 episode of Hollywood Insiders with Hawk Koch, the director and current Directors Guild of America president said the DGA has made progress on AI protections in labor agreements, according to TheWrap’s report on the interview.
The DGA’s 2023 agreement with employers already put language around generative AI. The guild’s contract summary said DGA-covered duties must be assigned to a person, that generative AI does not constitute a person, and that employers may not use generative AI in connection with creative elements without consulting the director or another covered worker.
The guild’s 2026 agreement renewed those safeguards. The DGA said the new deal also reaffirmed that covered work must continue to be performed by a person and established director control over AI-generated footage.
The next problem, Nolan said, is that directors are rarely the copyright holders of the films they make, which means the companies that control those films must defend them against uses such as model training and AI recreations.
The Odyssey is now the example
Nolan pointed to Universal’s The Odyssey as evidence of what studios can do immediately. He said the end-credit boilerplate states that the film cannot be ingested or used as training data, language he described as a first.
NBCUniversal said on Nov. 5 that The Odyssey had grossed US$1.80 billion globally and would return to more than 1,000 screens in the U.S. and Canada on Dec. 11. That makes the notice more than a quiet legal footnote: it sits on one of Universal’s largest current assets, where AI training rights could carry real commercial value.
The warning does not settle how a court would apply fair use to every possible copying scenario. It makes Universal’s objection to training use explicit in the film’s own credits.
The fair-use fight is still unresolved
Nolan also criticized the way some companies discuss AI, saying the term can be used to blur accountability. His view lands inside a legal dispute that is still developing, not a settled rule that all AI training is unlawful or lawful.
In its May 2025 Part 3 report on generative AI training, the U.S. Copyright Office said fair use depends on facts such as the works used, their source, the system’s purpose and output controls. The office also said commercial use of large collections of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with those works goes beyond established fair-use boundaries, especially where the material was obtained through illegal access.
Labor groups are pressing the licensing point
Nolan’s comments also match the direction taken by entertainment unions in court. On Oct. 29, SAG-AFTRA, AFM, WGA West and WGA East said they filed an amicus brief in In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation to reject a categorical fair-use exemption for AI training and defend the rights and livelihoods of more than 250,000 workers.
The position is narrower than a blanket rejection of AI. It frames copyrighted work used to train commercial systems as licensable material, with consent and compensation handled by the rights holders and the people whose contracts give them a stake in downstream value.
What may change next
Nolan did not announce a lawsuit or a new industry-wide rule. The near-term question is whether more studios add anti-training language to credits, contracts, licensing agreements and licensing policies.
Those notices will not replace lawsuits, but they give labor groups a clearer target when they press employers to negotiate over training licenses and potential compensation.
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