Nolan says The Odyssey's credits forbid AI training, but only Universal can enforce the line
Christopher Nolan says The Odyssey's end credits state the film cannot be used to train AI, and called it a first. Universal has used a similar warning since June 2025, and as he says, only the studio that owns the copyright can enforce it.
Christopher Nolan is pleased that the end credits of The Odyssey say the film cannot be ingested, scraped or used to train generative AI, and he called it a first. A line like that is only as strong as whoever owns the film, and on almost every Hollywood movie that is the studio, not the director.
Nolan, president of the Directors Guild of America since fall 2025, made the point on the Hollywood Insiders podcast on Nov 7. "With very few exceptions in the guild, we are not the copyright holders of the films that we've worked on," he said. "It's down to the studios to do that." The guild's next push, in his words, is holding the studios to account for protecting those copyrights.
The first is less new than it sounds. Universal has put a "may not be used to train AI" warning at the end of its films' credits since How to Train Your Dragon in June 2025, followed by Jurassic World Rebirth and The Bad Guys 2, The Hollywood Reporter found. In some countries that warning cites a 2019 European Union copyright law that lets rights holders opt out of data mining. Nolan may mean a first for his own films or for the "ingested" wording; the exact text in The Odyssey's credits has not been published.
He also argued that AI companies leaning on fair use will lose in the long run, comparing training to music sampling, which the courts settled decades ago. That is his prediction, and the training cases are still being fought.
Our take: a credit line is a notice, not a lock. Whoever holds the copyright decides whether it is ever enforced, which is why the guild is now pressing the studios as well as the AI companies.
Source: Hollywood Insiders podcast via Deadline and TheWrap, Nov 7 and 8, 2026; The Hollywood Reporter, Aug 2025.
