Netflix earnings calls are usually about subscriber numbers and revenue projections and analysts asking variations of the same questions they asked last quarter. Thursday’s call had all of that. The financial results were fine, revenue hit $12.56 billion for the second quarter, up 13.4 percent year over year, net income was $3.4 billion, Wall Street was more or less satisfied. None of that is the story.
The story is that Netflix disclosed, in its shareholder letter, that roughly 300 of its programs have used generative AI somewhere in their production process so far in 2026, per Variety.
Three hundred. In one year. Across every stage of production from concept through release.
That number is going to generate a reaction and it already has. But before the discourse runs away from the facts, it is worth reading exactly what Netflix said and what its co-CEO Ted Sarandos said on the call, because the specifics matter and the framing is more nuanced than the headline number might suggest.
What Was Actually in the Disclosure
Netflix named three shows specifically to explain what generative AI is doing inside its productions. The Indian sports thriller series Glory. The Brazilian soccer miniseries Brasil 70: A Saga do Tri. And the American Revolution docuseries The American Experiment.
All three used AI to create what Netflix called “highly complex sequences,” including enhanced crowd sizes and battle sequences. The American Experiment example got the most detail. Sarandos said on the earnings call that 17 minutes of AI-enhanced footage in that series “expanded the scope of the series that just wouldn’t have been feasible before” and that those sequences were made “twice as fast and at half the cost of previous options.”
The shareholder letter also included a line that is going to be quoted a lot: “In some cases, productions would have had to leave out key shots and sequences in the absence of GenAI technology.”
Read that carefully. Netflix is not only saying AI made things cheaper. It is saying certain things would not exist without it. That is a different kind of claim.
“We are increasingly leveraging these tools to deliver higher-quality output more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional methods,” the company added.
What Sarandos Said About Jobs and Creative Work
On whether AI replaces creative workers: “We believe it takes great artists to make something great, and AI is not changing that. Movies are being made by people who make movies. AI provides them with better tools to make them even better.”
He has been saying versions of this for a while. In March he told Politico that AI “should be a creator tool,” comparable to other production technologies that have evolved over time. And he added a line that is easy to gloss over but actually carries a lot of weight: “I don’t think faster and cheaper matters if it’s not better.”
That is a bar. Netflix is implicitly claiming it has cleared it on these 300 programs. Whether the audience agrees is a different conversation.
The InterPositive piece adds context here. Netflix acquired InterPositive in March. It is the company Ben Affleck founded. Sarandos described its purpose this way: “Using their own dailies, using their own production materials to make the film that they’re making better. Still requires writers and actors and lighting techs and all the things that you’d use to make a movie, but be able to make the movie more effective, more efficient.”
He added: “I do think that AI, particularly InterPositive, the company we bought from Ben [Affleck], will help creators make things better.”
The deal is still in its “early days” but Sarandos said the company has already seen its impact on productions.
Why This Announcement Is a Bigger Deal Than It Might Look
Netflix is not the first entertainment company to use generative AI in production. It is not even the first to acknowledge it. But disclosing 300 programs in a single earnings period is a scale that changes the conversation from “some companies are experimenting with this” to “this is how Netflix makes content now.”
The company has been using AI elsewhere too. Its recommendation algorithm. Its advertising business. An AI animation studio it has been building internally. Add production to that list and AI is now embedded at multiple levels of the company simultaneously.
For the entertainment industry broadly, the pressure from this disclosure is real. Streaming economics are brutal and efficiency is always being maximized. If Netflix can produce complex sequences at half the cost and twice the speed while maintaining quality, every studio and streamer competing with it has an incentive to do the same. The technology has gone from a future concern to a present reality at the scale of the industry’s largest content producer, and that changes the timeline on a lot of conversations that felt theoretical six months ago.
Sarandos’s consistent line, that great artists remain essential and AI only makes their work better, is what Netflix needs people to believe. It is also, to be fair, what he clearly believes based on how consistently and specifically he has argued it across multiple public appearances. Whether that framing holds as the technology deepens and competitive pressure intensifies is the part nobody knows yet.
We have watched enough disruptions in entertainment to know that what a company says in the early stages of adopting a transformative technology and what happens five years later are not always the same story. What Sarandos is describing sounds genuinely thoughtful. What happens when the tools get better and the cost pressures get worse is the question the industry is going to be answering for a long time.
Have you watched Glory, Brasil 70: A Saga do Tri, or The American Experiment on Netflix? If you have, tell us in the comments whether any of it felt different to you, and whether knowing AI was involved in those sequences changes how you think about them. And if you have broader thoughts on where Netflix is heading with all of this, say so. This is a conversation that the people actually watching this content should be part of.
