The deal, which brings Disney’s intellectual property to OpenAI’s video generation platform Sora, is structured to balance “aggressive” intellectual property protection with a willingness to embrace inevitable technological disruption, Iger said. Under the terms of the three-year agreement, Disney will license approximately 200 characters for use within Sora, allowing users to create short-form videos featuring iconic figures ranging from Mickey Mouse to Star Wars personalities.

Iger framed the partnership not as a concession to AI, but as a necessary evolution—and one that is actually good for human artists. This is because the deal does not include name and likeness, nor does it include character voices. “And so, in reality, this does not in any way represent a threat to the creators at all, in fact, the opposite. I think it honors them and respects them, in part because there’s a license fee associated with it.” Iger stressed repeatedly Disney wants to be on the cutting edge of how technology reinvents entertainment. “No human generation has ever stood in the way of technological advance, and we don’t intend to try.”

The partnership stands in stark contrast to Disney’s relationship with other tech giants. On the same day the OpenAI deal was announced, Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google regarding alleged misuse of IP. Iger explained the divergence in approach by noting that, unlike Google, OpenAI has agreed to “honor and value and respect” Disney’s content through a licensing fee and safety guardrails. “We have been aggressive at protecting our IP, and we have gone after other companies that have not honored our IP,” Iger said, adding conversations with Google had failed to “bear fruit.”

A win-win partnership?

For OpenAI, reportedly under pressure from the aforementioned Google—whose Gemini 3 has been hailed by AI luminaries such as Salesforce billionaire Marc Benioff—the deal represents a validation of its generative video technology. Altman told CNBC user demand for Disney characters was “sort-of off the charts,” and he envisioned a future in which fans can generate custom content, such as a “Buzz Lightyear custom birthday video” or a personalized lightsaber scene. Altman argued the partnership would unlock “latent creativity” in the general public by lowering the skill and effort required to bring ideas to life.

The collaboration will also extend to Disney’s own streaming platform. Iger revealed plans to integrate “user prompted Sora-generated content” directly into Disney+. He said specifically Disney has “wanted for a long time to have what we will call user-generated content on our platform,” suggesting this partnership is a defensive move with regard to streaming giant YouTube and social media epicenter TikTok, which is partially under the control of the Ellison family that also controls entertainment rival Paramount.

The deal includes undisclosed warrants, giving Disney a financial stake in OpenAI’s success. Iger confirmed the warrants and declined to offer more specifics. He compared this forward-thinking approach to Disney’s 2005 decision to license shows to iTunes, viewing the OpenAI partnership as the modern equivalent of boarding a “profound wave” of societal change.

Iger revealed the groundwork for this deal was laid several years ago, saying he had first met Altman in 2022, when he was retired from Disney, before his comeback as CEO. Altman gave Iger a “bit of a road map” about where OpenAI was headed, and Disney has been “extremely impressed” with OpenAI’s growth since then, with all of Altman’s predictions from 2022 coming true a lot faster than either party realized. Iger added Disney sees great opportunities to license other product from OpenAI in the years ahead, which he sees being a huge push in “essentially accomplish[ing] a lot of what we feel we need to accomplish in the years ahead.”

Chen Zhao, head of economics research at Redfin, wrote in a Wednesday post that the Fed’s December interest rate cut won’t move mortgage rates “because markets have already priced it in.” 

The Federal Reserve controls the Federal funds rate, which is a rate that banks charge each other and is more closely tied to credit cards, personal loans, and home-equity lines. A standard 30-year mortgage, on the other hand, is a long-term loan, and the pricing of those loans are tied more closely to yields on longer-term bonds like the 10-year Treasury and mortgage-backed securities. 

“Since this rate cut was no surprise, the markets have taken it in stride,” 43-year mortgage industry veteran Melissa Cohn, regional vice president of William Raveis Mortgage, told Fortune. She said more dropping shoes in terms of economic data will be the real turning point: “The future of bond yields and mortgage rates will be determined as new data on jobs and inflation get released.”

The current mortgage rate is 6.3%, according to Mortgage News Daily, which is of course much higher than the sub-3% rate that homebuyers from the pandemic era remember, although it’s also a far cry from the 8% peak in October 2023. 

“The committee’s projections and Chair Jerome Powell’s remarks indicate that this will be the last interest cut for a while,” Zhao wrote. “Given the underlying economic fundamentals of 3% inflation coupled with a weakening—but not recessionary—labor market, the Fed is likely to hold steady in the near future.

“Mortgage rates are unlikely to fall or rise by much,” she continued.

How mortgage rates affect housing affordability

Mortgage rates are just one piece of the housing affordability puzzle. While it may feel as if it’s the major roadblock in the ability to buy a home—especially having a recent memory of the pandemic housing boom—mortgage rates are only one factor. 

To put it in perspective, Zillow reported earlier this year not even a 0% mortgage rate would make buying a house affordable in several major U.S. cities. 

Let that sink in. 

Even without any interest accrued on a loan, homebuying is still out of reach for the typical American. Much of the affordability crisis has to do with home prices, which are more than 50% higher than in 2020. This has locked out new homebuyers from entering the market and current homeowners from selling. 

The mortgage rate drop required to make an average home affordable (to about 4.43%) for the typical buyer is “unrealistic,” according to Zillow economic analyst Anushna Prakash.  

“It’s unlikely rates will drop to the mid-[4% range] anytime soon,” Arlington, Va.–based real estate agent Philippa Main told Fortune. “And even if they did, housing prices are still at historic highs.” With 11 years of experience, Main is also a licensed mortgage loan officer.

To be sure, some economists see some light at the end of the tunnel for homebuyers plagued by high mortgage rates and home prices.

“For prospective buyers who have been waiting on the sidelines, the housing market is finally starting to listen,” wrote First American chief economist Mark Fleming in an Aug. 29 blog post. First American’s analysis takes into account inflation, and Fleming said: “The price of a house today is not directly comparable to the price of that same house 30 years ago.”

Fidji Simo, the former InstaCart CEO who now serves as OpenAI’s CEO of applications, told reporters that the model should not been seen as a direct response to Google’s Gemini 3 Pro AI model, which was released last month. That release prompted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to issue a “code red,” delaying the rollout of several initiatives in order to focus more staff and computing resources on improving its core product, ChatGPT.

“I would say that [the Code Red] helps with the release of this model, but that’s not the reason it is coming out this week in particular, it has been in the works for a while,” she said.

She said the company had been building GPT-5.2 “for many months.” “We don’t turn around these models in just a week. It’s the result of a lot of work,” she said. The model had been known internally by the code name “Garlic,” according to a story in The Information. The day before the model’s release Altman teased its imminent rollout by posting to social media a video clip of him cooking a dish with a large amount of garlic.

OpenAI executives said that the model had been in the hands of “Alpha customers” who help test its performance for “several weeks”—a time period that would mean the model was completed prior to Altman’s “code red” declaration.

These testers included legal AI startup Harvey, note-taking app Notion, and file-management software company Box, as well as Shopify and Zoom.

OpenAI said these customers found GPT-5.2 demonstrated a “state of the art” ability to use other software tools to complete tasks, as well as excelling at writing and debugging code.

Coding has become one of the most competitive use cases for AI model deployment within companies. Although OpenAI had an early lead in the space, Anthropic’s Claude model has proved especially popular among enterprises, exceeding OpenAI’s marketshare according to some figures. OpenAI is no doubt hoping to convince customers to turn back to its models for coding with GPT-5.2.

Simo said the “Code Red” was helping OpenAI focus on improving ChatGPT. “Code Red is really a signal to the company that we want to marshal resources in one particular area, and that’s a way to really define priorities and define things that can be deprioritized,” she said. “So we have had an increase in resources focused on ChatGPT in general.”

The company also said its new model is better than the company’s earlier ones at providing “safe completions”—which it defines as providing users with helpful answers while not saying things that might contribute to or worsen mental health crises.

“On the safety side, as you saw through the benchmarks, we are improving on pretty much every dimension of safety, whether that’s self harm, whether that’s different types of mental health, whether that’s emotional reliance,” Simo said. “We’re very proud of the work that we’re doing here. It is a top priority for us, and we only release models when we’re confident that the safety protocols have been followed, and we feel proud of our work.”

The release of the new model came on the same day a new lawsuit was filed against the company alleging that ChatGPT’s interactions with a psychologically troubled user had contributed to a murder-suicide in Connecticut. The company also faces several other lawsuits alleging ChatGPT contributed to people’s suicides. The company called the Connecticut murder-suicide “incredibly heartbreaking” and said it is continuing to improve “ChatGPT’s training to recognize and respond to signs of mental or emotional distress, de-escalate conversations and guide people toward real-world support.” 

GPT-5.2 showed a large jump in performance across several benchmark tests of interest to enterprise customers. It met or exceeded human expert performance on a wide range of difficult professional tasks, as measured by OpenAI’s GDPval benchmark, 70.9% of the time. That compares to just 38.8% of the time for GPT-5, a model that OpenAI released in August; 59.6% for Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5; and 53.3% for Google’s Gemini 3 Pro.

On the software development benchmark, SWE-Bench Pro, GPT-5.2 scored 55.6%, which was almost 5 percentage points better than its predecessor, GPT-5.1, and more than 12% better than Gemini 3 Pro.

OpenAI’s Aidan Clark, vice president of research (training), declined to answer questions about exactly what training methods had been used to upgrade GPT-5.2’s performance, although he said that the company had made improvements across the board, including in pretraining, the initial step in creating an AI model.

When Google released its Gemini 3 Pro model last month, its researchers also said the company had made improvements in pretraining as well as post-training. This surprised some in the field who believed that AI companies had largely exhausted the ability to wring substantial improvements out of the pretraining stage of model building, and it was speculated that OpenAI may have been caught off guard by Google’s progress in this area.