A Big One
Foundry Buys Griptape, Rewrites its Legal Stack
Impact: High — direct for VFX and animation studios
Foundry completed its acquisition of Griptape on February 18, and legal integration is now visible. During our window, the Griptape privacy and terms pages stopped serving Griptape content and started serving Foundry's.
What Changed
Three new clauses are flagging. An AI-output ownership clause
vests ownership of generated outputs in the licensee but conditions it on third-party rights in "the underlying AI models, training data, or other components" — any encumbrance on the model or its training data rides along with your work. A regulatory-fine indemnification clause makes the licensee responsible for Foundry's costs arising from non-compliant use, and non-compliant is not narrowly defined. A third-party AI model disclaimer says Foundry has not reviewed or pre-vetted any of the third-party AI components it integrates with — meaning: do your homework on models you plug into.
Prohibited and High-Risk Uses: Foundry's on-prem EULA — the document that governs Nuke, Mari, Modo, Katana — now contains a new "Prohibited and High-Risk Uses" clause that imports EU AI Act framing directly into the contract. The software cannot be used for anything classified as high-risk under the EU AI Act.
Privacy Notice Expansion: Covers "all products and services offered by Foundry," on SaaS or on-prem, and new data categories now explicitly collected include AI prompt and input data, telemetry on which third-party AI models are selected, and deployment and configuration data. Foundry is rolling out AI orchestration across its creative software, and the legal framework to govern it is arriving at the same time. If your pipeline uses any Foundry product, this is the most important change in the entire corpus.
