Israeli generative AI company Bria.ai has won two major awards at the Hollywood Professional Association’s (HPA) 2026 Tech Retreat, highlighting growing interest in AI systems designed to protect intellectual property and compensate creators in the entertainment industry.
The company received both the Transformative Impact Award and the Innovation in Pre-Production Award, recognition reserved for technologies expected to significantly influence how professional media and entertainment content is created.
Bria develops a visual generative AI platform used by developers and production studios. Its system focuses on a growing concern in Hollywood: how artificial intelligence models are trained on creative content such as films, television shows, music and written works.
Many AI models today are trained on large amounts of publicly available data, often including creative works produced by studios and artists, without direct compensation or licensing agreements. Bria says its technology takes a different approach, relying on licensed training data and built-in attribution systems designed to track the origin of creative material and ensure creators are credited and compensated.
“We built Bria because the creatives whose work trains these models deserve to be compensated,” said Dr. Yair Adato, Bria’s founder and CEO. “That’s not a compliance checkbox — it’s a foundational design principle.”
The HPA awards, presented annually at the organization’s Tech Retreat, highlight technologies that could reshape the professional media industry. According to Leon Silverman, former president of the Hollywood Professional Association, the Transformative Impact Award recognizes innovations that could set new standards for how content is produced and delivered.
“This award recognizes the product or technology with the most potential to transform the professional media content industry ecosystem,” Silverman said.
Building an AI model owned by the industry
Following the awards, Bria said it is beginning a new initiative with major Hollywood studios and entertainment organizations to develop a jointly owned AI model.
The proposed model would be trained on participating studios’ content libraries and governed collectively by the organizations contributing to it. Bria would provide the technical infrastructure, including its attribution technology designed to track the origins of AI-generated outputs across images, video, music and text.
The goal, according to the company, is to allow the entertainment industry to develop and control its own AI tools, rather than relying entirely on outside technology companies.
“What we are building with our studio and industry partners is not another AI product for Hollywood to evaluate,” Adato said. “It is a mechanism for the industry to own its own future in AI.”
A growing debate in Hollywood
The recognition comes at a time when artificial intelligence is becoming a central issue for the entertainment industry. Studios, writers, musicians and actors have increasingly raised concerns about how their work is used to train generative AI models.
Bria says its platform is designed with those concerns in mind. The company’s models are trained on fully licensed datasets from more than 30 partners, and its patented attribution system is intended to establish provenance and ensure that rights holders can be compensated when their work contributes to AI-generated content.
Founded as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for generative visual AI, Bria’s technology is used by developers and production companies building AI-powered creative tools.
The company has received several industry recognitions in recent years, including a place on the CB Insights AI 100 list, the SiliconANGLE TechForward Award for AI Governance, and Fast Company’s Next Big Thing in AI 2025.