Technology isn't moving forward quietly. It's breaking into entertainment, security, and daily work all at once.
From Disney's $1 billion push into OpenAI's Sora to the launch of GPT-5.2, major security patches from Google and Microsoft, and DeepSeek's open-source progress, December 2025 marks a turning point. These updates are not just headlines. They are changing how we create content, search for information, and protect our data online.
In this latest tech updates of mid-December 2025 overview, you'll discover how these moves impact businesses, developers, and regular users, and what you should be doing about them right now.
Disney Invests $1 Billion in OpenAI and Licenses Characters for Sora
The Walt Disney Company announced a landmark $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI as part of a three-year licensing partnership, granting Sora access to more than 200 characters from the Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars franchises. This agreement represents one of the most significant endorsements of AI-generated content from a major entertainment conglomerate, signalling growing confidence in AI video creation technology among traditional media companies.
Under the licensing terms, Sora users can now create social videos featuring Disney's extensive character library, including animated figures, creatures, and props like Star Wars lightsabers. Disney will also receive significant ownership rights over content produced on the platform featuring its characters and can curate and feature standout user-generated videos on Disney+, creating a new revenue stream and reinforcing content-creation workflows powered by AI. This partnership demonstrates how established media companies are strategically positioning themselves in the AI video generation market.
OpenAI Launches GPT-5.2 Following Internal "Code Red" Response
OpenAI released GPT-5.2 on December 11, 2025, marking its most advanced AI model to date following an internal "code red" alert triggered by Google's Gemini 3 taking the lead on industry benchmarks. The accelerated release demonstrates intense competition in the large language model space, with CEO Sam Altman prioritising improvements in ChatGPT's speed, reliability, and customisation capabilities to maintain market position.
GPT-5.2 arrives in three variants: Instant for quick tasks, Thinking for complex reasoning work, and Pro for the highest-accuracy scenarios. The model delivers substantial improvements in long-context reasoning (supporting up to 256k tokens with near-perfect recall), reduced hallucinations (38% fewer than GPT-5.1), and enhanced coding capabilities.
Google Tech Updates
Google Releases December 2025 Core Update for Search
Google announced and began rolling out its December 2025 core update, representing the third major core update of the year following the March and June 2025 updates. This comprehensive algorithm update is designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers across all types of websites, with the rollout expected to take up to three weeks. Early reports indicate significant SERP restructuring beyond traditional ranking changes, including YouTube carousels displacing traditional results for key queries and shifting click-through rate distributions.
The core update affects how Google's ranking systems assess content quality and relevance across the entire web, making it one of the most impactful algorithm changes the search engine has announced. Unlike targeted updates that focus on specific ranking factors or spam, core updates broadly recalibrate Google's search quality signals, potentially causing significant traffic shifts for websites based on content quality and alignment with search intent.
Google Chrome Releases Security Updates Fixing 13 Vulnerabilities
Google released a critical security update for Chrome in early December 2025, addressing 13 vulnerabilities, four of which are rated high severity. One particularly concerning vulnerability was discovered in Chrome's Digital Credentials feature, which facilitates the sharing of verified information from digital wallets.
With approximately 3.4 billion Chrome users globally, these security updates have significant implications for internet security. The update emphasises the importance of immediate action to upgrade to Chrome version 143.0.7499.41 or later.
Adobe Integrates Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat into ChatGPT
Adobe announced the integration of Photoshop, Adobe Express, and Acrobat into ChatGPT, extending professional creative tools to its 800 million weekly active users. This integration enables users to edit images, design graphics, and manage PDFs through natural language prompts without leaving the chat interface, dramatically lowering the barrier to entry for professional-grade creative work.
Within ChatGPT, users can now leverage Photoshop's advanced image editing capabilities by simply stating editing requests, adjusting brightness, contrast, and exposure, removing backgrounds, or applying creative effects. At the same time, Adobe Express enables design creation and animation. Acrobat integration allows PDF merging, text extraction, and table editing through conversational prompts. These features are available globally on desktop, web, and iOS platforms, with Android support for Photoshop and Acrobat coming shortly, representing a significant strategic move by Adobe to introduce millions of users to its professional applications.
McDonald's Withdraws AI-Generated Christmas Advertisement Following Backlash
McDonald's Netherlands withdrew its AI-generated Christmas advertisement on December 9, 2025, following significant public backlash on social media. The 45-second commercial, created with generative AI elements by Dutch firm TBWA\Neboko in collaboration with American production company The Sweetshop, depicted chaotic holiday scenes and featured the tagline "the most terrible time of the year," suggesting customers escape holiday stress by hiding at McDonald's until January.
The ad sparked fierce criticism online, with viewers calling it "creepy," "depressing," and "soulless," with one user commenting that it "single-handedly ruined my Christmas spirit." In response, McDonald's Netherlands acknowledged the backlash, stating that the experience was "an important learning" as the company explores practical AI usage. The controversy highlights broader concerns about the quality and authenticity of AI-generated content in holiday marketing, as well as the tension between AI cost efficiency and consumer sentiment.
Microsoft Patch Tuesday: 56 Security Vulnerabilities Patched in December 2025
Microsoft released its final patch addressing at least 56 security vulnerabilities across Windows operating systems and supported software. The update tackled one zero-day bug already being exploited in the wild and two publicly disclosed vulnerabilities. Of the 56 patches, three were classified as Critical severity, while the remainder received Important ratings, covering Windows components, Office, Microsoft Edge, Exchange Server, Azure, Copilot, PowerShell, and Windows Defender.
This December release brought Microsoft's 2025 vulnerability patch count to approximately 1,139 CVEs, making 2025 the second-largest year in patch volume, trailing only 2020 by 111 CVEs. The increase reflects Microsoft's expanding product portfolio and the growing prevalence of AI-related security issues that require patches. The company expects this trend to continue into 2026 as AI capabilities become more deeply embedded across enterprise systems.
DeepSeek Releases V3.2 and V3.2-Special Open-Source Models
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek announced two groundbreaking open-source models: DeepSeek-V3.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale, positioning itself as a major challenger to U.S.-based AI leaders. DeepSeek-V3.2, described as "your daily driver," offers GPT-5-level performance with balanced trade-offs between inference speed and output length, and supports tool-calling and function invocation for real-time applications. The model represents a significant upgrade from V3.2-Exp and now supports thinking mode within tool use, enabling advanced reasoning during function calls.
DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale, the high-compute reasoning variant, achieves gold-medal-level performance in elite mathematical competitions, including the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), China Mathematical Olympiad (CMO), ICPC World Finals, and IOI 2025, with 96% performance on the AIME benchmark, matching or exceeding GPT-5 and Google Gemini 3.0 Pro capabilities.
Conclusion
The rapid advancements seen this month, particularly with GPT-5.2 and Disney's strategic partnerships, signal that AI is moving from experimental tools to foundational business infrastructure. However, the industry is also facing growing pains, as evidenced by the backlash against McDonald's AI ad and the urgent security patches released by Microsoft and Google to protect billions of users.
As the latest tech updates in mid-December 2025 reshape the market, the contrast between DeepSeek's open-source innovation and the closed ecosystems of Western tech giants highlights a diversifying playing field. Success in the coming year will depend on leveraging these powerful new tools, such as the Adobe-ChatGPT integration, without losing the human connection and authenticity that audiences still demand.
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